Literary Humor

Marcovaldo is an unskilled worker in a drab industrial city in northern Italy. He is an irrepressible dreamer and an inveterate schemer. Much to the puzzlement of his wife, his children, his boss, and his neighbors, he chases his dreams - but the results are never the expected ones.

Jane Austen skewers the novelistic extremes of her day made popular in many 18th-century Gothic potboilers. Dilapidated castles, locked rooms, inexplicable chests, enigmatic notes, and tyrannical fathers all figure into Northanger Abbey, but with a decidedly sardonic twist.

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.

At the start of this fiendishly comic and suspenseful novel, a mild-mannered English academic chuckles as he watches his wife commit adultery. The action takes place before she met him. But lines between film and reality, past and present become terrifyingly blurred in this sad and funny tour de force from the author of Flaubert’s Parrot.

Taylor Bell comes from a long line of Beta Zeta sorority sisters, all of whom expect her to pledge upon starting at the university. However, Taylor is determined to destroy the rich tradition they hold so dear by eschewing sorority life altogether. Taylor's resolve soon melts, though, when she falls in with a group of hilarious, ultra-saucy girls who introduce her to all things Greek and soften her to the idea of joining.

Swallow the Ghost traces the impact of a violent event on three different lives, each interconnected story further complicating the truth. Things are going well for Jane Murphy, or so it seems. She’s making it in New York, a sort of wunderkind at the social media marketing startup where she...

Es una sucesión perturbadora en la que la conciencia adquiere una dimensión real y los impulsos más secretos se presentan con toda su altanera desnudez: el amor conyugal, el amor por las letras, el amore de las madres, el platónico, el primer amor, el amor en la posmodernidad, el amor por el trabajo, y otros amores y desamores, inconfesables, condenados, acomodaticios que, unos más que otros, nos matan.

Von Andy Warhol entdeckt, als Stilikone und Talkgast verehrt, ist Fran Lebowitz in den USA eine Kultfigur. Mit der Netflix-Serie "Pretend It's a City" ihres Freundes Martin Scorsese wird sie weltweit gefeiert. Lebowitz' Ruhm begründet aber hat ihr Schreiben, das sie als ebenso aufmerksame wie weise Beobachterin der Menschen und ihres Alltags zeigt.

Pamela is a newly retired teacher with time on her hands. She’s finding it hard to muster enthusiasm for what’s ahead: exhausting postdivorce dating rituals and an uneasy relationship with her emotionally stunted, live-at-home son. But for Pamela, there’s a surprise in store that could challenge the status quo and, against all expectations, make life interesting again.

Nestled among Seattle's skyscrapers, The Zephyr Holdings Building is a bleak rectangle topped by an orange-and-black logo that gives no hint of Zephyr's business. Lack of clarity, it turns out, is Zephyr's defining characteristic. The floors are numbered in reverse. No one has ever seen the CEO or glimpsed his office on the first (i.e., top) floor. Yet every day people clip on their ID tags, file into the building, sit at their desks, and hope that they're not about to be outsourced.

Look who's on the Dick Gibson Radio Show: Arnold the Memory Expert ("I've memorized the entire West Coast shoreline - except for cloud cover and fog banks"). Bernie Perk, the burning pharmacist. Henry Harper, the nine-year old orphan millionaire, terrified of being adopted. The woman whose life revolves around pierced lobes. An evil hypnotist. Swindlers. Con-men. And Dick Gibson himself. Anticipating talk radio and its crazed hosts, Stanley Elkin creates a brilliant comic world held together by American manias and maniacs in all their forms.

Webster's Dictionary gives the meaning of the word "miasma" as "an infection floating in the air; a deadly exhalation". And in the opinion of Mr. Robert Ferguson, that description, though perhaps a little too flattering, on the whole summed up Master Roland Bean pretty satisfactorily. Until the previous day, Master Bean had served Mr. Ferguson in the capacity of office-boy. But there was that about Master Bean which made it practically impossible for anyone to employ him for long.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that every man in possession of a wife must be in want of a son. Seventeen eighty-five was to be the most marvelous year of Marianne's life until an unfortunate turn of events left her in a compromised state and desperate for a husband to care - or rather cover - for her. Now she is stuck in an undesirable marriage to Mr. Edward Bennet, a man desperate in his own way for a male heir.

Gussie Fink-Nottle can't quite find the pluck to ask the girl of his dreams to marry him. He consults Jeeves of course. But Bertie, feeling his lemon just as supple as his manservant's, steps in and takes over the case. What follows is a torrent of hilarious hijinks, as only PG Wodehouse can deliver.

It's 1994, and the former Yugoslavia is being torn apart. In England a gang of good-hearted young people are about to set off in a Ford Transit van armed with several sacks of rice and a half-written play. A play which will light a beacon of peace across the Balkans and, very probably, stop the war. Andrew would love to stop the war. He has one of the most comprehensively developed personal foreign policies of anyone working on a building site in the Greater Manchester area. He feels everyone should have a foreign policy, really. What sort of person doesn't?

Fallow, by Sarah Anderson is a forthcoming title from Farrar, Straus and Giroux...

The Black Knight Chronicles: lots of vampires. No sparkles. Serious snark. This bundle includes books one through there: Hard Day's Knight, Back in Black, and Knight Moves.

The farmers of Paradise County have been leading a hardscrabble life unchanged for generations. The Communist government has encouraged them to plant garlic, but selling the crop is not as simple as they believed. Warehouses fill up, taxes skyrocket, and government officials maltreat even those who have traveled for days to sell their harvest. A surplus on the garlic market ensues, and the farmers must watch in horror as their crops wither and rot in the fields. Families are destroyed by the random imprisonment of young and old for supposed crimes against the state. Meanwhile, a blind minstrel incites the masses to take the law into their own hands....

What I wanted more than anything was to be standing beside Schmidt, in concert with Schmidt, at the foot of Saint Sebastian’s Abyss along with Schmidt, hands cupped to the sides of our faces, debating art, transcendence, and the glory of the apocalypse.” Former best friends who built their careers writing about a single work of art meet after a decades-long falling-out. One of them, called to the other’s deathbed for unknown reasons by a “relatively short” nine-page email, spends his flight to Berlin reflecting on Dutch Renaissance painter Count Hugo Beckenbauer.

Strange things are happening at Belpher Castle. For starters, the Earl's sister is intent on pairing off her stepson, Reggie, and niece, Lady Patricia (known as Maud). Maud, however, is in hot pursuit of Geoffrey Raymond, and she is also being pursued by the unacceptable composer, George Bevan.