Literary Humor

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.

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.

Under the Glacier represents Nobel laureate Halldor Laxness at his entertaining and brilliantly inventive best. Philosophy, theological speculation and charming wit combine to make this novel a timeless fable of modern times. A youthful emissary of the Bishop of Iceland travels to the beautiful and mysterious district of Snæfellsnes, locally known as "Under Glacier" to investigate the affairs of the parish and its enigmatic pastor.

On the advice of a five-dollar psychic, Tina Martin, a zany, overworked mother of two, quits her high-powered job and moves her family to Shanghai. Tina yearns for this new setting to bring her the zen-like inner peace she’s always heard about on infomercials. Instead, she becomes a totally exasperated fish out of water. Fish Heads and Duck Skin will resonate with anyone who has ever wondered who they are, why they were put here, and how they ever lived before eating pan-fried pork buns.

The riotously funny second novel by the New York Times bestselling author of Everyone Here Is Lying, Shari Lapena, that explores what happens when art collides with commerce. Will Thorne is a stalled poet, married to Judy, a wildly successful celebrity economist. Pressured by a starving fellow...

*Best New Science Fiction for Summer by The Washington Post *A Most-Anticipated book of 2017 by The Millions Everyone else knows the truth about you, now you can know it, too. That’s the slogan. The product: a junky contraption that tattoos personalized revelations on its users’...

Fifteen years ago, a murder/suicide in room 712 rocked the grand old Bellweather Hotel and the young bridesmaid who witnessed it. Now hundreds of high school musicians, including quiet bassoonist Rabbit Hatmaker and his brassy diva twin, Alice, have gathered in its cavernous, crumbling halls for the annual Statewide festival; the grown-up bridesmaid has returned to face her demons; and a snowstorm is forecast that will trap everyone on the grounds. Then one of the orchestra’s stars disappears—from room 712.

In this 1919 collection, Wodehouse introduces readers to the iconic duo of Bertie Wooster, an affable but hapless English gentleman, and Jeeves, his brilliant and resourceful valet. From social blunders, hopeless romances and family mishaps, Bertie is saved by Jeeves’s calm intellect time and time again. Also featured in this collection is the wealthy yet helpless Reggie Pepper, a character often considered an early prototype of Bertie.

For William ‘Billy’ Fisher, an energetic imagination makes life tolerable, but well-nigh intolerable for all around him. He lies his way into and out of every situation, making any promise to get him out of trouble, thereby creating ever more tortuous entanglements to be wriggled out of in the future. Billy dreams of escaping the dull drudgery of his life at home with his parents and grandmother in the monotony of his stifling Yorkshire hometown.

Martin Amis blends vivid memories, sharp wit, and tender honesty to deliver an unforgettable memoir that explores his relationships with family, personal tragedies, and the absurdities of being known. In Experience, the celebrated novelist Martin Amis steps away from fiction to deliver a sharply...

Set in the capital city of the world's happiest country, a comedy of manners about depression, the pressures of marriage, and the possibility of falling in love again, from the bestselling author of A House for Happy Mothers.

One day Arthur Friedland piles his three sons into the car and drives them to see the Great Lindemann, Master of Hypnosis. Protesting that he doesn't believe in magic even as he is led onto the stage, Arthur nevertheless experiences something. Later that night, while his family sleeps, he takes his passport, empties all the money from his bank account, and vanishes. In time, still absent from his family, he begins to publish novels and becomes an internationally renowned author.

Arthur Dreyfuss is a young mechanic at a garage in the little community of Long, France. He has a small flat and leads a simple life. So, imagine his surprise when he opens his door one evening to find a distraught Hollywood starlet standing before him. But although feigning an American accent, this woman is not all that she seems. For her name is actually Jeanine Foucamprez - and her story is very different from the glamorous life of a star.

Unwritten in the annals of the sporting world is the story of a man with unlimited potential who was denied his rightful place in the lore of golf...It is a story that might never have been told had Charley Hunter not accepted a summer internship at Butler & Yates, a prestigious Atlanta law firm. Bobby Jones, the legendary amateur golfer, had once been a partner at the firm and his old legal files had been severely neglected over the years.

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.

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...

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...

The Story of My Life by Jay McInerney is a hilarious, sobering portrait of 1980s New York City featuring 20-something actress Alison Poole and her coterie of club-hopping, coke-addicted friends. In this breathlessly paced novel, McInerney revisits the nocturnal New York of Bright Lights, Big City. Alison Poole is a budding actress already fatally well versed in hopping the clubs, shopping Chanel, falling in and out of lust, and abusing other people's credit cards.

In 1920s America, a plague is spreading fast. From New Orleans to Chicago to New York, the "Jes Grew" epidemic makes people desperate to dance, overturning social norms in the process. Anyone is vulnerable and when they catch it, they'll bump and grind into a frenzy. Working to combat the Jes Grew infection are the puritanical Atonists, a group bent on cultivating a "Talking Android", an African American who will infiltrate the unruly black communities and help crush the outbreak.

"Beautiful." —Sarah Jessica Parker "The best thing you'll read this year." —Kiley Reid, author of Such a Fun Age A raw, tenderly comic, and perfectly off-kilter novel about a woman who occasionally finds herself in "The Pit”—a delirious state of semiconsciousness—and the improbable...