Literary Humor

Legendary author Larry McMurtry—who has both a Pulitzer Prize and an Academy Award to his credit—concludes the story of Duane Moore, who first appeared in the 1966 classic The Last Picture Show.... Fast approaching 70, Duane is adjusting to the loneliness of retirement. Then things get stirred up when a billionaire heiress moves to the area and opens a rhinoceros sanctuary.

Meet Tom. Or Dr O’Grady, as he used to be called. When you pass him on the street, most people don’t even give him a second glance. You see, Tom isn’t living his best life. Burdened by grief, he’s only got his loyal dog, Bette Davis, for company and a rucksack containing his whole world. Then there’s Ruth and her son, DJ, who no longer have a place to call home. But Ruth believes that you can change the world by helping one person at a time - and Tom needs her help. There are a thousand ways to find your home - you just need to be brave enough to look for them.

The video stores are dying. But most of you don't care. You've got your Netflix and your Redbox and your DVR, so why deal with VHS tapes or scratched DVDs? Why deal with the grumpy guy at the worn-down independent video store?

Morgan Gower is bored of the tedium of his ordinary life: of his job as manager of a run-down hardware store; of his wife; of his "industriously dull" daughters; of his mother; of his sister. But Morgan's secret escape lies in a box filled with costumes, filled with everything from a fake beard to Napoleon's tricorne to Daniel Boone, all of which provide an outlet away from his life and into the identity of someone who is assuredly not Morgan Gower.

It's 1939, in New York City. Joe Kavalier, a young artist who has also been trained in the art of Houdiniesque escape, has just pulled off his greatest feat: smuggling himself out of Hitler's Prague. He's looking to make big money, fast, so that he can bring his family to freedom. His cousin, Brooklyn's own Sammy Clay, is looking for a partner in creating the heroes, stories, and art for the latest novelty to hit the American dreamscape: the comic book.

Helen Moran is 32 years old, single, childless, college educated, and partially employed as a guardian of troubled young people in New York. She is accepting a furniture delivery in her shared studio apartment when her uncle calls to break the news: Helen's adoptive brother is dead. According to the Internet, there are six possible reasons why her brother might have killed himself. But Helen knows better: she knows that six reasons is only shorthand for "the abyss".

Seymour is the least popular student at Glendale, a private school in Manhattan. His new nickname, “Chunk-Style”, is in danger of entering common usage. But then he meets the new transfer student: Elliot Allagash, evil heir of America’s largest fortune. Elliot’s rampant delinquency has already gotten him expelled from dozens of prep schools. But despite his best efforts, he can’t get himself thrown out of Glendale; his father has simply donated too much money. Bitter and bored, Elliot amuses himself by transforming Seymour into the most popular student in the school.

Sidi lives a hermetic life as a bee whisperer, tending to his beloved “girls” on the outskirts of the desolate North African village of Nawa. He wakes one morning to find that something has attacked one of his beehives, brutally killing every inhabitant. Heartbroken, he soon learns that a mysterious swarm of vicious hornets committed the mass murder - but where did they come from, and how can he stop them? If he is going to unravel this mystery and save his bees from annihilation, Sidi must venture out into the village and then brave the big city and beyond in search of answers.

Everyone in Cape Cod thinks that Mother is a wonderful woman: pious, hardworking, frugal. Everyone except her husband and seven children. To them she is a selfish and petty tyrant, endlessly comparing her many living children to the one who died in childbirth, keeping a viselike hold on her offspring even as they try to escape into adulthood. Welcome to Mother Land: a suffocating kingdom of parental narcissism.

Dans certaines familles, les repas de fêtes se suivent et se ressemblent : mêmes plats, mêmes convives, mêmes discussions. Sauf cette année. Il suffit d'un rien pour que les bonnes manières volent en éclat : non-dits, vieilles rancunes et mauvaise foi vont transformer le dîner de fête en un règlement de compte en bonne et due forme. Et si les repas de famille étaient enfin l'occasion de se dire les choses ?

In London’s Pimlico neighborhood lies a tenement described in architectural guides as “a building of no interest whatsoever.” But the residents of Corduroy Mansions—including a literary agent, a wine merchant, a thoroughly unpleasant member of Parliament, and a vegetarian dog—are a rather fascinating lot.

Struggling American writer Tim Nolinger pursues his journalism career in Paris while proper Frenchwoman Anne Sophie plans their wedding. When Tim covers the theft of a valuable manuscript, the story leads the couple to the local home of a reclusive American film director and his actress wife. Once there, Tim and Anne Sophie find themselves in the midst of a murder investigation, a French-American feud, and a reckless love affair that threatens to destroy their marriage even before it begins.

Alan Blair, the hero of Wake Up, Sir!, is a young, loony writer with numerous problems of the mental, emotional, sexual, spiritual, and physical variety. He's very good at problems. But luckily for Alan, he has a personal valet named Jeeves, who does his best to sort things out for his troubled master. And Alan does find trouble wherever he goes.

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...

When the Little Nugget, alias thirteen-year-old Ogden Ford, "bulgy, rude, chain-smoking son of an American millionaire," arrives at Sanstead House School, the fun begins. Mr Peter Burns, a none-too-dedicated schoolmaster, engaged by snobbish Mr. Abney to educate his handpicked pupils, soon finds himself and his enraptured class at the mercy of an American gunman...and at the beginning of a series of truly mind-boggling adventures in a delicious Wodehouse tale of suspense, excitement, and romance.

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.

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...

After 200 years undead, Jane Austen still has bite. But will her most recent literary success be her last? Life was a lot easier for Jane when she was just an unknown, undead bookstore owner in a sleepy hamlet in upstate New York. But now the world embraces her as Jane Fairfax, author of the best-selling novel Constance - and she’s having a killer time trying to keep her true identity as the Jane Austen a secret. Even the ongoing lessons in How to Be a Vampire, taught by her former lover Lord Byron, don’t seem to be helping much.

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.