Literary Humor

Tom Jones is greatly admired not only for the meticulous craft with which it was written, but also for its humor, objectivity and penetrating psychological depth. It is without a doubt one of the great contributions to the English novel, and as such will always maintain a place of honor in world literature. Through the minute examination of the motives of his characters, Henry Fielding revealed many universal truths about human nature.

Winston Kang and Jared Cahill seem like the perfect couple. When they check-in for their flight to Cambodia, where they're headed to meet the surrogate carrying their baby girl, even the woman at the airline counter recognizes it: "I'm so happy that marriage is legal for you guys," she says. But while Jared is already planning for their second kid—half white like him, half Korean like Wynn—Wynn isn't ready to give up his dreams of becoming a hip-hop dancer to become "the hostage of a crying, pooping terrorist." So he does what anyone in his position would do: He leaves Jared at the airport.

Napoleon has England on edge. For the cunning and conniving Becky Sharp, it’s an opportunity to take advantage of the chaos and improve her lowly station. Her friend Amelia Sedley, a blue-blood pawn, affords Becky entrée into the moneyed class. As the guileless Amelia pines for a rakish soldier, the ruthless Becky climbs upward, setting the stage for a domestic battlefield of greed, ambition, deception, and dizzying reversals of love and fortune.

Ils n'ont qu'une addiction : le sang. Mais depuis plus de vingt ans, ils ont décidé de renoncer à leur péché mignon et de se désintoxiquer. Pas facile d'être un vampire urbain au XXIe siècle ! Dans une banlieue british tout ce qu'il y a de plus respectable, les Radley essayent désespérément de se comporter comme « des gens normaux ». Mais des vampires de souche peuvent-ils définitivement refouler leurs désirs et leurs instincts ? Pas sûr.

Let’s face it: Talking about race can be difficult. It’s a slippery subject, rife with as many perspectives as there are people in the world. But laughter gets us talking. It has the power to break down barriers and draw us closer together. In Open Mic, acclaimed author and speaker Mitali Perkins invites us to listen in as 10 authors for young adults - some familiar, some new - step up to the mic and share their stories about what it’s like growing up between cultures.

A stunning collection of stories exploring love and art, luck and loss, from the “invaluable” (George Saunders) author of How to Behave in a Crowd and The Material “These stories don’t close so much as continue inside you. They tilt the world and don’t set it back, leaving you to live...

In the playful style of Tom Robbins, Ed Abbey, and Kurt Vonnegut, Shawn Hartje’s Pipeliner is a laugh-out-loud journey through ‘90s culture. Idaho, 1993: Seventeen-year-old Jason Krabb falls for a girl from the other side of town who’s mixed up with a ragtag crew of pipeliners bringing gas lines through the high desert. Jason’s hilariously naive struggle to distinguish himself as one of the crew while attempting to leave his mark on the ‘90s grunge scene is a stirring reflection on adolescence.

Buttarelli legge il mondo come un libro a cui mancano le pagine pari o, se ci sono, rimangono indecifrabili. La sua vita, oscurata per metà e ristretta nello spazio elementare di una stanza e di una strada, è un tragicomico susseguirsi di inciampi e di intuizioni, di vessazioni e di casualità. Quando Buttarelli scompare - e intorno alla sua figura si crea un alone di mistero - non resta che raccogliere, per tentare di fare un po' di chiarezza o forse per aumentare la confusione, la testimonianza del suo amico nullafacente Gualtieri.

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.

Pussy is the story of Prince Fracassus, heir presumptive to the Duchy of Origen, famed for its golden-gated skyscrapers and casinos, who passes his boyhood watching reality shows on TV, imagining himself to be the Roman Emperor Nero, and fantasizing about hookers.

He is idle, boastful, thin skinned and egotistic. He has no manners, no curiosity, no knowledge, no idea and no words with which to express them. Could he, in that case, be the very leader to make the country great again?

Sidney Geeder, King of Mortgages, wants nothing more than to cash in his lucrative company stock and quit his job, but his dreams are threatened by the disappearance of Eggs Igino, the only possible man who can replace him.

When Connecticut mechanic and foreman Hank Morgan is knocked unconscious, he wakes not to the familiar scenes of 19th century America, but to the bewildering sights and sounds of 6th century Camelot. Although confused at first and quickly imprisoned, he soon realizes that his knowledge of the future can transform his fate. Correctly predicting a solar eclipse from inside his prison cell, Morgan terrifies the people of England into releasing him and swiftly establishes himself as the most powerful magician in the land, stronger than Merlin and greatly admired by Arthur himself.

Researching female orgasms, Dr. Steven J. Fisher thinks he has sex down to an exact science. But Dr. Fisher is really just a shy chemist who is a beginner in the ways of love. When a beautiful and orgasmically-challenged Ph.D. student named Annie begins participating in his study, everything Dr. Fisher thinks he knows about women is turned on its head.

By his longtime friend and a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist, the definitive biography of Larry McMurtry, the legendary author and screenwriter of Lonesome Dove, The Last Picture Show, and Brokeback Mountain, who transformed our vision of the West. Before Larry McMurtry became one of the...

Raised by vampyre relatives, Jane grows to resent the lifestyle's effect on her upbringing. No sunlight, nighttime hours, and a diet of bloody red meat is no way for a mortal girl to live. Things change for Jane when the ghost of her uncle visits her, imparts her parents' slayer history, and charges her with the responsibility of striking out to find others of her kind and learn the slayer ways.

Una Fogarty, suffering from dementia in a seaside nursing home, would be all alone without her brother Dan, whose epic free-verse monologue tells their family story. Exile from Ireland and immigrant life in England. Their mother’s trials as a call girl. Young Una’s search for love in a seemingly haunted hippie squat, and the two-timing Scottish stoner poet she’ll never get over. Now she sits outside in the sun as her memories unspool from Dan’s mouth and his own role in the tale grows ever stranger—and more sinister.

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.

Set at the fag-end of the 60s at the moment when Swinging London is starting to take on a darker hue in the wake of Charles Manson's murders, and framed as a novel within a novel published by a seedy Piccadilly-based publisher of pulp fiction, Man-Eating Typewriter is a homage to the great oulipo experiments in fiction. It is the story of a psychopath called Raymond Novak and his untimely demise told entirely in 'polari' - a language developed and used mainly amongst the metropolitan homosexual community in the time when being gay was still a criminal offence.

An exuberant, brutally hilarious novel about a young woman’s insatiable quest to carve her own path—even if she needs to step over a few dead bodies along the way It’s 1974 and San Francisco is full of mystery and menace. Nineteen-year-old Celia Dent keeps telling herself how lucky she is...

""SCREAMING, CRYING, THROWING UP! Cry Havoc is a fever worth catching, a gloomy and gorgeous pleasure."" — Maggie Thrash, author of Rainbow Black A humorous dark academia novel, set in a failing English girls’ school in the 1980s, in which a teen running from her past becomes immersed in a...