Literary Humor

The nine stories and one poem in this volume formed the basis for the astonishingly original film Short Cuts, directed by Robert Altman. Collected altogether in this volume, these stories form a searing and indelible portrait of American innocence and loss. With deadpan humor and enormous tenderness, this is the work of "one of the true contemporary masters" ( The New York Review of Books).

From “one of the most gifted novelists of his generation” (Time), Other People is a tale about a woman’s path toward self-actualization. A woman wakes in an emergency room and remembers nothing—not even her own name. She hears a song about a “Mary” and a “lamb,” and decides to...

Blending fact and fiction, China Dream is an unflinching satire of totalitarianism. Ma Daode, a corrupt and lecherous party official, is feeling pleased with himself. He has an impressive office, three properties, and multiple mistresses who text him day and night. After decades of loyal service, he has been appointed director of the China Dream Bureau, charged with replacing people's private dreams with President Xi Jinping's great China Dream of national rejuvenation.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER The bestselling author of Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe is at her superb best in this fun-loving, moving novel about what it means to be truly alive. WINNER OF THE SOUTHERN BOOK PRIZE Elmwood Springs, Missouri, is a small town like any other, but...

Edward St. Aubyn's Patrick Melrose novels were some of the most celebrated works of fiction of the past decade. Ecstatic praise came from a wide range of admirers, from literary superstars such as Zadie Smith, Francine Prose, Jeffrey Eugenides, and Michael Chabon to pop-culture icons such as Anthony Bourdain and January Jones. Now St. Aubyn returns with a hilariously smart send-up of a certain major British literary award in this witty audiobook.

In this witty, charming follow-up to the acclaimed Crooked Heart, the life of lies a small time scammer and her adopted son have constructed in London becomes endangered during the tumultuous final months of World War II. It’s late 1944. Hitler’s rockets are raining down on London with...

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.

Discover the “extraordinary” (The Washington Post) debut novel that “announces the arrival of a literary supernova” (The New York Times Book Review),“a drama of childhood that is as wild as it is intimate” (Chigozie Obioma). WINNER OF THE EDGAR AWARD ONE OF TIME’S 100...

Warren Ziller moved his family to California in search of a charmed life, and to all appearances, he found it: a gated community not far from the beach, amid the affluent splendor of Southern California in the 1980s. But his American dream has been rudely interrupted. Despite their affection for one another - the "slow, jokey, unrehearsed vaudeville" they share at home - Warren; his wife, Camille; and their three children have veered into separate lives, as distant as satellites.

Despite the title, Dickens's portrayal of early industrial society is less relentlessly grim than that in novels by contemporaries such as Elizabeth Gaskell or Charles Kingsley. Hard Times weaves the tale of Thomas Gradgrind, a hard-headed politician who raises his children Louisa and Tom without love and to have no empathy, their lives completely devoid of beauty, culture, or imagination. Only after a series of crises does their father realise that the manner in which he raised his children has ruined their lives.

This program is read by Noah Galvin, who starred in The Good Doctor, Dear Evan Hansen, The Real O'Neals, and Booksmart. "A Star is Bored is an absolute knockout. Riotously funny and wickedly tender." — Taylor Jenkins Reid, New York Times bestselling author of Daisy Jones and the Six People...

A Good Morning America Summer Must-Read! From the bestselling authors of The Knockoff, an outrageously funny novel about one woman's attempt—through clay diets, naked yoga, green juice, and cultish workout classes—to win back her career, save her best friend, and lose thirty pounds. When...

Two auditors for the US egg industry go rogue and conceive a plot to steal a million chickens in the middle of the night - an entire egg farm's worth of animals. Janey and Cleveland - a spirited former runaway and the officious head of audits - assemble a precarious, quarrelsome team and descend on the farm on a dark spring evening. A series of catastrophes ensues.

Stevie, a recovering alcoholic and kitchen manager of Chappy’s, a small-chain restaurant, is frantically trying to prevent the people around her from going supernova: her PTSD-suffering veteran son, her uproariously demented parents, the polyglot eccentrics who work in her kitchen, the blind geriatric dog she inherits, and a damaged 5-year-old who landed on her doorstep and might just be her granddaughter. In the tight grip of new corporate owners, Stevie battles corporate’s “restructuring” to save her kitchen.

On the Ides of March, our hero, Raleigh Whittier Hayes (forgetful husband, baffled father, prosperous insurance agent, and leading citizen of Thermopylae, North Carolina), learns that his father has discharged himself from the hospital, taken all his money out of the bank and, with a young Black female mental patient, vanished in a yellow Cadillac convertible. Left behind is a mysterious list of seven outrageous tasks that Raleigh must perform in order to rescue his father and his inheritance.

Amid the cactus wilds some two hundred miles from Hollywood lies a privileged oasis called Desert D'Or. It is a place for starlets and would-be starlets, directors, studio execs, and the well-groomed lowlifes who cater to them. And, as imagined by Norman Mailer in this blistering classic of 1950s Hollywood, Desert D'Or is a moral proving ground, where men and women discover what they really want - and how far they are willing to go to get it.

Weighing in at 320 pounds, Winston "Tuffy" Foshay, is an East Harlem denizen who breaks jaws and shoots dogs and dreams of millions from his idea, Cap'n Crunch: The Movie, starring Danny DeVito. His best friend is a disabled Muslim who wants to rob banks, his guiding light is an ex-hippie Asian woman who worked for Malcolm X, and his wife, Yolanda, he married from jail over the phone. Shrewdly comical as this dazzling novel is, it turns acerbically sublime when the frustrated Tuffy agrees to run for City Council.

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.

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.

My Man Jeeves is a collection of short stories by P. G. Wodehouse, first published in the United Kingdom in May 1919. Of the eight stories in the collection, half feature the popular characters Jeeves and Bertie Wooster, while the others concern Reggie Pepper, an early prototype for Bertie Wooster.