Literary Humor

Lionel Asbo, a terrifying yet weirdly loyal thug (self-named after England's notorious "Anti-Social Behaviour Order"), has always looked out for his ward and nephew, the orphaned Desmond Pepperdine. He provides him with fatherly career advice (always carry a knife, for example) and is determined they should share the joys of pit bulls (fed with lots of Tabasco sauce), Internet porn, and all manner of more serious criminality. Des, on the other hand, desires nothing more than books to read and a girl to love .

To this irresistible debut collection of short stories, Richard Russo brings the same bittersweet wit, deep knowledge of human nature, and spellbinding narrative gifts that distinguish his best-selling novels. His themes are the imperfect bargains of marriage; the discoveries and...

The year is 2084, and that famous Margaret Thatcher quote has become a reality: There really is no such thing as society. No one speaks to anyone else. No one looks at anyone else. People don’t collaborate, they only compete...It all sounds rather morbid, does it not? But please don’t despair, there is hope, and it comes in the form of our hero: Renee Ann Blanca. Wishing to fill the society-shaped hole in her life, our Renee does the unthinkable: She goes in search of human company!

Dan Starkey is a young journalist in Belfast, who shares with his wife, Patricia, a prodigious appetite for drinking and dancing. Then Dan meets a beautiful and apparently impoverished student. And then, terrifyingly, she is murdered. Is it because she was not exactly who she claimed to be? Is it the IRA? A Protestant extremist group? A jealous lover? Before long, Dan is a target himself.…

An incisive, wickedly funny novel about a graduate student who decides to follow her disgraced mentor to a university that gives safe harbor to scholars of ill repute, igniting a crisis of work and a test of her conscience (and marriage). Helen is one of the best minds of her generation. A young...

Candide, the illegitimate nephew of a German baron and student of eternal optimist Pangloss, is living a simple and sheltered life in "the best of all possible worlds." But when Candide falls in love with the wrong woman, his uncle's young daughter, he is exiled from the baron's castle and suffers great tragedy and catastrophe, which leaves him disillusioned and questioning the goodness of the universe.

A charmingly exuberant comic debut from an exciting new literary voice, and a “quirky, hilarious, elegantly written farce” (The Daily Telegraph), The Extraordinary Journey of the Fakir Who Got Trapped in an Ikea Wardrobe is the globetrotting story of a trickster from rural India and his...

Tom Perrotta's thirtysomething parents of young children are a varied and surprising bunch. There's Todd, the handsome stay-at-home dad dubbed "The Prom King" by the moms of the playground; Sarah, a lapsed feminist with a bisexual past, who seems to have stumbled into a traditional marriage; Richard, Sarah's husband, who has found himself more and more involved with a fantasy life on the Internet than with the flesh and blood in his own house; and Mary Ann, who thinks she has it all figured out.

From the beloved creator and star of The Righteous Gemstones and Eastbound & Down comes a wild collection of short stories featuring Danny McBride’s signature dark humor. There are many sides to Danny McBride: he starred as the iconic character Kenny Powers in the cult classic HBO show...

New York City is on high alert: a gasoline truck is stuck in the Midtown tunnel and the driver has fled. Through panic and gridlock, Alex and Ruth must transport their beloved old dachshund, whose back legs are suddenly paralyzed, to the animal hospital, using a cutting board as a stretcher. But this is also the weekend when Alex and Ruth must sell the apartment in which they have lived for most of their adult lives.

Sur les conseils de son médecin qui s’inquiète de ses dérapages récents, Nicolas part deux mois loin de son travail, de sa femme et de ses enfants. Un vent de liberté souffle dans ses cheveux et lui donne envie de mordre dans la vie comme si c’était un beau gros beigne débordant de crème. Il voyage, fait des rencontres, tente de réconforter de vieux amis aussi mal en point que lui; tout ça ne peut que mal finir.

The Bible offers some clues to God's personality - he's alternately been called vindictive and just, bloodthirsty and caring, all-powerful and impotent, capricious and foresighted, and loving and hateful. But no one has ever fully explored why God might be such a figure of contrasts. Nor has anyone ever satisfactorily explained what guides his relationship not just with angels, the devil, and his son, but also with all of creation.

The Sarah Book is Scott McClanahan's continuation of the semi-autobiographical portrait he's been writing over the years about his life in West Virginia. This one is his portrait of love.

Mr Edgar Finchley, unmarried clerk, aged 45, is told to take a holiday for the first time in his life. He decides to go to the seaside. But Fate has other plans in store...From his abduction by a cheerful crook, to his smuggling escapade off the south coast, the timid but plucky Mr Finchley is plunged into a series of the most astonishing and extraordinary adventures. His rural adventure takes him gradually westward through the English countryside and back, via a smuggling yacht, to London.

It's New Year's Eve, the holiday of forced fellowship, mandatory fun, and paper hats. While dining out with her husband and their friends, Kirshenbaum's protagonist - an acerbic, mordantly witty, and clinically depressed writer - fully unravels. Propelled by stand-up comic timing and rife with pinpoint insights, Kirshenbaum examines what it means to be unloved and loved, to succeed and fail, to be at once impervious and raw. Rabbits for Food shows how art can lead us out of - or into - the depths of disconsolate loneliness and piercing grief.

A provocative satire of love, sex, money, and politics that unfolds over four wild days in so-called “paradise”—the long-awaited first novel from the acclaimed author of Sam the Cat “I seriously, deeply love this book.”—Michael Cunningham NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR...

One of Faulkner's comic masterpieces, The Reivers is a picaresque that tells of three unlikely car thieves from rural Mississippi. Eleven-year-old Lucius Priest is persuaded by Boon Hogganbeck, one of his family's retainers, to steal his grandfather's car and make a trip to Memphis. The Priest's...

Escape to Paris this summer and prepare to be swept off your feet.... Anouk LaRue used to be a romantic, but since she had her heart well and truly broken her love life has dissolved into nothing more than daydreams of the perfect man. Retreating to her extraordinary Little Antique Shop has always been a way to escape, because who could feel alone in a shop bursting with memories and beautiful objects? Until Tristan Black appears at an auction and throws her ordered world into a spin.

Shandee finds a friendly arm at a granite quarry. Ned drops down a hole in a golf course. Luna meets a man made of light bulbs at a tanning parlor. So begins Nicholson Baker's fuse-blowing, sex-positive escapade, House of Holes. Baker returns to erotic territory with a gleefully over-the-top novel set in a pleasure resort, where normal rules don't apply. Brimful of good-nature, wit, and surreal sexual vocabulary, this is a modern-day Hieronymous Boschian bacchanal that is sure to surprise, amuse, and arouse.

Irreverently juggling magical realism, film noir, hip hop, and chicanismo, Tropic of Orange takes place in a Los Angeles where the homeless, gangsters, infant organ entrepreneurs, and Hollywood collide on a stretch of the Harbor Freeway. Hemmed in by wildfires, it's a symphony conducted from an overpass, grandiose, comic, and as diverse as the city itself - from an author who has received the California Book Award and the Association for Asian American Studies Book Award, among other literary honors.