Literary Humor

Hank Fitzpatrick's life is what you might expect from a manchild stumbling his way from his teens to his thirties in small town Indiana: hypersexual, drunk, stoned, prone to fits of spontaneous masturbation, occasionally Catholic, and accidentally well-intentioned. Caught in the crossfire of raging hormones, bad decisions and family tragedy, Hank is just a boy not yet ready to be a man.

A collection of short stories from The Big Garage on Clear Shot chronicles the offbeat lives of the colorful inhabitants of The End of the Road, a small town in Alaska...

A Harvard reunion prompts a Boston Brahmin’s search for meaning in this comedy of manners by the number-one New York Times best-selling author of Point of No Return.

Renowned photo-journalist Jude Montgomery arrives in Glasgow in 2014, in the wake of the failed Scottish independence referendum, and it's clear that she's searching for someone. Is it Anna Mason, who will go on to lead the country as First Minister? Jamie Hewitt, guitarist from eighties one-hit wonders The Hypnotist? Or is it Rabbit—Jude's estranged foster sister, now a world-famous artist? Taking us back to a school shooting in her Texas hometown, and a 1980s road trip across the American West, Jude's search ends in Glasgow, and a final event that only one person can fully explain.

In the Memorial Room is a brilliant black comedy by the celebrated author of An Angel at My Table. Harry Gill, a moderately successful writer of historical fiction, has been awarded the annual Watercress-Armstrong Fellowship - a 'living memorial' to the poet Margaret Rose Hurndell. He arrives in the small French village of Menton, where Hurndell once lived and worked, to write. But the Memorial Room is not suitable - it has no electricity or water. Hurndell never wrote here, though it is expected of Harry.

A year has passed, and in this third novel of the Pop Larkin series, Pop Larkin is preparing to build the bungalow he promised Charley and Mariette upon their engagement. He buys a country home slated for demolition, intending to convert it for the two, but it is not long before a London couple persuade him to sell it. Pop, ever the trickster, sells it for an extortionate price, as the two social climbers know little about country life.

In the near future, Berlin’s real estate is being flipped in the name of “sustainability”, only to make the city even more unaffordable; artists are employed by corporations as consultants, and the weather is acting strange. When Anja and Louis are offered a rent-free home on an artificial mountain - yet another eco-friendly initiative run by a corporation - they seize the opportunity, but it isn’t long before the experimental house begins malfunctioning.

Performance artists Caleb and Camille Fang dedicated themselves to making great art. But when an artist's work lies in subverting normality, it can be difficult to raise well-adjusted children. Just ask Buster and Annie Fang. For as long as they can remember, they starred (unwillingly) in their parents' madcap pieces. But now that they are grown up, the chaos of their childhood has made it difficult to cope with life outside the fishbowl of their parents' strange world.

From the people who bought you The Hundred-Year-Old Man Who Climbed out of the Window and Disappeared another quirky, thought-provoking, Swedish comic novel with attitude. Titus Jensen is waiting for his big break, but he’s middle aged, has a fondness for alcohol, and no one takes him seriously. He makes ends meet by giving public readings from obscure books at festivals. He can’t help thinking there has to be more to life for an author of his quality…

Ranging from the wicked noir Shanghai of 1946 to the echo chambers of Hollywood to remote, snow-covered mountains, Stuart Archer Cohen's This Is How It Really Sounds follows three men, each in search of a different life.

In the tradition of Colson Whitehead's Zone One, a visionary debut novel about shelter, escape, family, violence, and dumpster diving. It's the story of a restless group of young squatters. They've run away from their families and their pasts, questing after knowledge of their most wild selves, roaming the half-empty suburbs of America, occupying the homes of the foreclosed or vacationing, never staying in one place long enough to attract attention while shoplifting beer at the local Speedy Stop.

The funny man is a middling comic in an unnamed city. By day he takes care of his infant son, by night he performs in small clubs, sandwiched between other aspiring comics. His wife waits tables to support the family. It doesn't sound like much, but they're happy, more or less. Until the day he comes up with it. His thing. His gimmick. And everything changes. He's a headliner, and the venues get bigger fast. Pretty soon it's Hollywood and a starring role in a blockbuster, all thanks to the gimmick.

“Katherine Heiny's work does something magical: elevates the mundane so that it has the stakes of a mystery novel, gives women's interior lives the gravity they so richly deserve -- and makes you laugh along the way.” —Lena Dunham Single, Carefree, Mellow is that rare and wonderful thing...

"Wise and witty... Losing It is cringingly insightful about sex and dating and all the ways we tie ourselves into knots over both." --The New York Times Book Review A hilarious novel that Maggie Shipstead calls "charming... witty and insightful," about a woman who still has her virginity at...

From the author of the National Book Award longlisted epic The Great Offshore Grounds, here is the debut novel that launched her career—a story of activism, police violence, and white guilt in a not so distant dystopian America. “An ambitious encapsulation of our modern times, Zazen tackles...

The beloved author of Early Morning Riser brings us glittering stories of love—friendships formed at the airport bar, ex-husbands with benefits, mothers of suspiciously sweet teenagers, ill-advised trysts—in all its forms, both ridiculous and sublime. Includes “Chicken-Flavored and...

Twelve women confront the mounting existential terrors of modern life in this absurd, wryly hilarious debut story collection. A woman's limbs disappear into “the cloud” during wildfire-induced power outages. A lonely DoorDasher accidentally becomes the star of someone else's reality show...

Benjamin lives with a name he hates in a run-down San Francisco apartment, until his brother Billy finds him. Billy's a war veteran who sleeps under a bridge with his loyal band of phone thieves, trying to avoid the police and the VA. Thirty years earlier, Benjamin had an Ivy League degree and was getting noticed for his Peace Corps work on the Ecuadorian coast. But Felicia also noticed, seducing him into a life of cajoling secrets from others to be peddled to the highest bidder. Felicia's talented protégé lived a privileged life until he made a mistake and had to flee with the name Gloria.

Everyone wants a comfortable place to die, and Kingsley Amis’s characters have found it in Tuppeny-happeny Cottage, where assorted septuagenarians have come together to see one another out the door of life. Ending Up is a grimly hilarious dance of death, full of bickering, bitching, backstabbing, drinking (of course), and idiocy of all sorts. It is a book about dying people and about a dying England, clinging to its memories of greatness as it succumbs to terminal decay.

Coinman is one of life's victims, the receiver of subtle bullying in an office environment and thinly disguised control in his own home, but remains true to his desire to be polite and accepting of how he is treated by everyone. Then, an incident at work changes all that. Huffington Post: One of the best literary fiction books of 2016 (Independently Published).