Humor Anthology

Incendiary Girls explores our baser instincts with vivid imagination and humor. In these stories, our bodies become strange and unfamiliar terrain, a medium for transformation. In "Fundamental Laws of Nature", a doctor considers her legacy, both good and bad, when she discovers that her mother has been reincarnated as a thoroughbred mare. In the title story, a mischievous angel chronicles the remarkable life of a girl just beyond death’s reach.

Matt Debenham's stories are for people who think they don't like short stories. These stories don't leave off in mid-breath; instead, they feature characters who seem to live on even after their closing pages. The humor in The Book of Right and Wrong makes the jarring moments that much more jarring, and the tender moments that much more tender. At once heartbreaking and hilarious, the 11 stories in The Book of Right and Wrong capture their characters at the defining moments of their lives.

A Pulitzer Prize finalist and winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, New York Times best-selling author Dave Eggers is the voice of a generation. This stunning collection of his matchless short fiction includes the highly acclaimed “The Only Meaning of Oil-Wet Water.”

It is said that a picture may be worth a thousand words, but an old photograph can inspire many more. In this beguiling book, Alexander McCall Smith casts his eye over five chanced-upon photographs from the era of black-and-white photography and imagines the stories behind them. Who were those people, what were their stories, why are they smiling, what made them sad?

Fifteen tales of horror, fantasy, science fiction, and the supernatural.

A writer Time magazine has said "everybody should read", Sam Lipsyte, author of the New York Times best-selling The Ask, offers up The Fun Parts, a book of bold, hilarious, and deeply felt fiction. A boy eats his way to self-discovery, while another must battle the reality-brandishing monster preying on his fantasy realm. In another story, an aerobics instructor, the daughter of a Holocaust survivor, makes the most shocking leap imaginable to save her soul. These are just a few of the tales, some first published in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and Playboy, that unfold in Lipsyte’s richly imagined world.

For sheer unpredictable brilliance, Gogol may come to mind, but no author alive today takes a listener as far as Helen DeWitt into the funniest, most yonder dimensions of possibility. Her jumping-off points might be statistics, romance, the art world’s piranha tank, games of chance and games of skill, the travails of publishing, or success.

In You Will Never Be Forgotten, Mary South explores how technology can both collapse our relationships from within and provide opportunities for genuine connection. Formally inventive, darkly absurdist, savagely critical of the increasingly fraught cultural climates we inhabit, these 10 stories also find hope in fleeting interactions and moments of tenderness. They reveal our grotesque selfishness and our intense need for love and acceptance, and the psychic pain that either shuts us off or allows us to discover our deepest reaches of empathy.

What did it mean for Christmas, now that Krampus would be taking the reins? Nothing good, everything bad. That's what.

Alvitania is a dazzling collection of satirical short stories and surreal tales that blend dark humor, magical realism, and sharp social commentary. From absurd business trips to vanished countries, dystopian futures to bizarre political revolutions, each story in Tim Wexler’s anthology invites listeners into a world that is both uncannily familiar and thrillingly strange.

It's junior year and Rachael is psyched to ditch dorm life and share a house with four other girls. But, she can't shake the ominous feeling about her narcissistic roommate-landlady, who has a history of derailing her love life. And then there are those uninvited visits by the ex-boyfriend of another roommate, who brings brushes with the law and heaps of drama as his calling card. When Rachael's mother and her psychic groupies show up in their double-decker bus during a house party, Mom reveals a troubling premonition.

O. Henry's short stories are well known for their wit, wordplay, warm characterization and clever twist endings.

E.E. King offers a unique perspective on life, love and sometimes the meaning of the universe. This exuberant collection of short fiction and a novella is often hysterical, occasionally tragic and always thoughtful. Funny and dark, these tales will have you up all night.

There is a distinct surreal quality to some (including "Exposure" and "And Now Let's Have Some Fun"), a strong sense of irony (as in "You Too Can Graduate in Three Years with an Advanced Degree in Contextual Semiotics"), and moments of awkward and therefore very real grapplings with sex and romance (most especially in "The Rescues" and the title story, "Welcome Thieves").

Meet Rowena Halley, a former human rights activist turned academic. Rowena thought teaching on US college campuses would be a lot safer than interviewing torture victims in Russia. Boy, was she wrong. Rowena quickly gets caught up in campus intrigue that threatens to turn deadly. Meanwhile, the life and lover she thought she’d left behind in Moscow might not be so firmly back in the past as she’d believed.

The irresistible wit and charm of Alexander McCall Smith's New York Times best-selling No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency series has won over countless fans. The same subtle humor and enchanting characterizations are full on display in At the Villa of Reduced Circumstances, the third entertaining novella starring Professor Doctor Moritz-Maria von Igelfeld.

Hell hath no fury like a raisin scorned. Hellraisin 3: The Wrath of Grapes!

Chuckle along with the best 19th-century humorists, who provide you with tall tales, puns, and witty ripostes. No guarantees of political correctness, but they're sure to tickle your 21st-century funny bone! Beginning with the piece that made Mark Twain famous -- "The Notorious Jumping Frog of Calaveras County" -- and ending with his fanciful "How I Edited an Agricultural Paper," this anthology collects several of Twain's own pieces in addition to tall tales, fables, and satires by 14 of Twain's contemporaries.

The Armor You Built, a genre-bending collection of short stories by Jonah Kruvant, delves into the complexities of human connection, authenticity, and the struggle for selfhood in a world that often demands conformity. Seamlessly blending satire, philosophical musings, and science fiction, the book explores the metaphorical "armor" people build to navigate cultural and familial pressures.

Seal Island is home to a moonshine-making billionaire, a pot-growing fisherman, a celebrity flower child, a handsome romance writer, a sex-addicted realtor, a womanizing pub owner, a cop, a pot-bellied pig…and a serial killer. The island is serene and remote. It is only accessible by boat. The residents like it that way, until those with the deepest and darkest of secrets start dying in the most bizarre of ways.