Humor Anthology

This book consists of 27 short stories of murder, mystery and mayhem. This is book one in a series of eight short story compilation books.

Already sold in eight countries around the world, these nine energized, irreverent stories from Nathan Englander introduce an astonishing new talent.

Available to listeners for the first time, Sucker’s Portfolio showcases a collection of seven never-before-published works from Kurt Vonnegut, one of the greatest writers of the 20th century. Short, sardonic, and dark, these six brief fiction stories and one non-fiction piece are consummate Vonnegut with piercing satire and an eye for life’s obscene inanity. Also available for the first time is an unfinished science-fiction short story, included in the appendix.

I Will Open My Mouth in Parables is a collection of fictional short stories recounting events that take place in or near the small town of Quick, West Virginia. The stories are set in the 1950's and are told in the first person by "Richie Smith."

It's that time of the year again, the holiday season. Between checkout lines a mile long, the office party hangover, battles with traffic, and delayed flights, what's better to do than to listen to The Worst Noel and laugh your holiday aggravation away? The collection features an eclectic mix of writers with playful, often dark humor as the common thread.

E.E. King delivers a collection of short stories that are original, funny, and always thought provoking. From a hilarious tale of an animal activist who can't get anything right to a man tasked with writing a guidebook for heaven. These tales will delight you.

Fearless, candid, and incredibly funny, Lauren Holmes is a newcomer who writes like a master. She tackles eros and intimacy with a deceptively light touch, a keen awareness of how their nervous systems tangle and sometimes short-circuit, and a genius for revealing our most vulnerable, spirited selves. With heart, sass, and pitch-perfect characters, Barbara the Slut is a head-turning debut from a writer with a limitless career before her.

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.

From the highly acclaimed author of Edisto and The Interrogative Mood, Padgett Powell's new collection of stories, Cries for Help, Various Stories, follows his mentor Donald Barthelme's advice that "wacky mode must "break their hearts". The surrealistic and comical terrain of most of the 44 stories here is grounded by a real preoccupation with longing, fear, work, loneliness, and cultural nostalgia. These universal concerns are given exhilarating life by way of Powell's "wit, his...dazzling turns of phrase" (Scott Spencer).

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

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.

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.

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.

Surprising and revealing, set along the East Coast from Maine to Key West, Ann Beattie's astutely observed new collection explores unconventional friendships, frustrated loves, mortality, and aging.

In vignettes both comic and sexy, the owner of a coffee shop recalls the day his first wife seemed to achieve a moment of simple perfection, while she remembers the women's softball game during which she was stricken by the beauty of the shortstop. A young couple spends hours at the coffee shop fueling the idea of their fierce love. A professor of philosophy, stopping by for a cup of coffee, makes a valiant attempt to explain what he knows to be the inexplicable workings of the human heart.

Few authors in America write with such sheer love of story, language, and imagination as T.C. Boyle, and nowhere is that passion more evident than in his inventive, wickedly funny, and widely praised short stories. In After the Plague, Boyle speaks of contemporary social issues in a range of emotional keys. Presented with characteristic wit and intelligence, these 16 stories will delight readers in search of the latest news of the chaotic, disturbing, and achingly beautiful world in which we live.