Humor Short

By turns humorous and heartbreaking, this debut collection offers weird and wonderful stories that illuminate the hidden truths of life.

Meet Blu Yunger, a wild and woolly young traveler who will take you for quite a ride in his fast Ford Fairlane. Along the way you’ll meet the beauteous Fakyah Aineedair, Big Roid Bagwith, and Trout Bender. If this picaresque adventure isn’t enough to hold you, there’s a handful of other tales to tug on your brainpan. Yes, Reef Perkins can be downright hilarious!

Welcome to the peculiar and headlong world of Brian Doyle's fiction, where the odd is happening all the time, reported upon by characters of every sort and stripe. Swirling voices and skeins of story, laughter and rage, ferocious attention to detail and sweeping nuttiness, tears and chortling - these stories will remind listeners of the late giant David Foster Wallace, in their straightforward accounts of anything-but-straightforward events and of modern short story pioneer Raymond Carver, a bit, in their blunt, unadorned dialogue.

In the stories of Confidence, there are ecstasy-taking PhD students, financial traders desperate for husbands, owners of failing sex stores, violent and unremovable tenants, aggressive raccoons, seedy massage parlors, experimental filmmakers who record every second of their day, and wives who blog insults directed at their husbands. There are cheating husbands. There are private clubs, crowded restaurants, psychiatric wards. There is one magic cinema, and everyone has a secret of some kind.

Während Fußballweltmeisterschaften versuchen sogar Deutsche, zu Brasilianern zu werden. Spätestens nach dem dritten Caipirinha in praller Sonne spricht man zumindest schon mal so wie Ailton: "Ailton nicht dick, Ailton schießt Tor, wenn Ailton Tor, dann dick egal." Ein Satz, der so quasi auch für mich gilt. So viel Weisheit wie bei Ailton findet man nicht alle Tage. ‚Ailton gut, guter Tag, Ailton nicht gut, morgen neuer Tag.‘ Daran sieht man auch, wirklich große Philosophie braucht keine Verben.

Including stories first published in Cosmopolitan and the Saturday Evening Post, this best-selling collection follows the romantic escapades of Max Shulman's famed collegiate Don Juan. Like most undergraduates, Dobie Gillis is a bit scattered - sometimes he's as quick as a whip, other times dull as a doorstop, and his major keeps changing from chemistry to law to journalism. But no matter what subject he should be studying, Dobie always has a girl on his mind.

Frank and Philby meet at university. Frank is the king of cool and dysfunctionally libidinous. Philby is nervous, nerdy and dysfunctionally insecure. Somehow, they form a team, and go about chasing girls, passing their degrees and surviving many a green drink experience. The hilarious misadventures of Frank and Philby are just part of what lies between the covers of Headgames....

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.

Früher marschierten sie im Stechschritt, heute besuchen sie Bauchtanzkurse: Die Deutschen haben sich ganz schön verändert - nur mit Gefühlen haben sie es noch immer nicht so. Moritz Netenjakob erzählt die lustigsten Geschichten aus dem Alltag - zum Staunen, Wiedererkennen und Lachen. Dabei gelingt ihm das Kunststück, exakte Alltagsbeobachtung, beißende Satire und warmherzige Figurenzeichnung zu einem Panoptikum deutscher Befindlichkeiten zu verweben, das vor allem eins ist: Sehr, sehr komisch.

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.

An awful poet, dumped by his girlfriend, roams through Italy, where he clearly doesn't belong; an oil delivery man falls in love with a clumsy woman and becomes even clumsier than she is; and a six-year-old and his father kill over 200 flies at a horse farm while the father wonders about life and death. Poor Advice and Other Stories, with its mix of the serious and the absurd, reveals Lou Gaglia's humor, imagination, and range.

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).

Within these diverse stories, you will encounter a magician whose finale is murder, shared nightmares, a magic carpet that lives up to its name, a recipe for a Martian non-vegetarian main course, a cook who purloins the body of a stranger, and other interesting topics and characters. A few can be classified as horror stories, one as science fiction, and the majority just plain quirky. There's a story here to amuse almost anyone.

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.

A Humanist Christmas is a collection of heartfelt stories originally shared with friends and family in the form of Christmas letters. Written with warmth and wit, these tales capture the joy, challenges, and small miracles the season. It is a book about Christmas Past—with memories sweet and bittersweet—and about Christmas Present—reflections on artificial trees and artificial intelligence—and about Christmas Future—how our dark times may be lightened by the Christmas spirit. It is a fun listen because Christmas should have “room for ideas as loopy as flying reindeer.”

A senior older brother calls his sister to pay for his prostitute. A dissatisfied young housewife attends a Total Woman seminar. Twirling class from a tyrannical band director. Just a few of the East Texas hard-living souls erupting from Small Texas, a collection of short stories from the wild mind of Cindy Marabito

This anthology consists of 50 stories, which are separated into four series, as well as independent stories.

In compiling this collection of humorous short stories by both well known and more obscure authors, Alexander Jessup applied a broad interpretation of humour; the stories span the period between 1839 and the beginning of the first World War.

Eighteen of the very best American short stories, each a classic in its own right. Stories include "The Little Frenchman and his Water Lots", by George Pope Morris; "The Angel of the Odd", by Edgar Allan Poe; "The Schoolmasters’s Progress", by Caroline M.S. Kirkland; "The Watkinson Evening", by Eliza Leslie; "Titbottom’s Spectacles", by George William Curtis; "My Double and "How He Undid Me", by Edward Everett Hale; "A Visit to the Asylum for Aged and Decayed Punsters", by Oliver Wendell; and more.