Showing results by publisher "Phoenix Books" in Literature & Fiction

While sifting through closets of junk in the mansion they have rented, Qwill and Koko uncover a mystery involving the suicide of the former owner and the murder of a potato farmer. By the author of The Cat Who Wasn't There.

Sissy Hankshaw, an almost flawlessly beautiful small-town girl with big-time dreams, hitchhikes her way into your heart, your hopes, and your sleeping bag in Tom Robbins's magical, funny, and most famous novel. Follow Sissy's amazing odyssey from Virginia to chic Manhattan to the Dakota Badlands, where FBI agents, cowgirls, and ecstatic whooping cranes explode in a deliciously drawn-out climax.

The Expo begins with a literal bang: a bomb wrecks the hotel, killing a housekeeper and causing extensive damage. Luckily for Pickax, Qwill is on the scene, his moustache twitching with suspicions that this bomb was intended as something stronger than a warning to someone. His evidence: Koko and Yum Yum's new interest in cheese, especially Gruyere, Brie and Feta. Qwill and the Siamese are on a case that will demand all their feline intuition and mustachioed insight!

In this seventh installment of the Jeeves series, the unflappable butler once again must apply his cleverness to rescue Bertie Wooster—this time from being arrested, lynched, and engaged by mistake! Chaos ensues when Aunt Dahlia demands that Bertie help dupe an antique dealer into selling her an 18th-century cow creamer. Complications grow as Bertie's pal Gussie Fink-Nottle is more interested in studying the effects of a full moon on the love life of newts rather than marrying Madeline Bassett.

In a stunning literary debut, Carrie Fisher chronicles the excruciatingly funny adventures of Suzanne Vale, young film star and drug addict, who survives a rehab clinic only to rejoin the equally harrowing world of Hollywood. Out there on the edge, despair flips into hilarity, and we're left laughing as Suzanne struggles to come to terms with her various fantasylands. Carrie Fisher's reading of her first novel evokes the deliciously irreverent humor that formed the lens through which she looked at life in the '80s.

Imagine this: When the stock market crashes on the Thursday before Easter, you, an ambitious broker, not overly successful or ethical, know you're facing the Weekend from Hell. With only 72 hours to scheme and scramble your way out of this nightmare, you find yourself confronted with a 300-pound psychic, a tattooed stranger, African rituals, legendary amphibians, outer space, and your own sexuality.

Without bothering to get approval from the President, the State Department, or even the FTC, Dave Barry's publishers sent him to Tokyo. You'd think they would have known better. Now the word is Barry has set back our diplomatic relations with the whole Pacific Rim by a couple of decades. Japanese culture, dining, sport, and industry all come under Barry's relentless scrutiny.

Toward the end of the 18th century, two young Germans set out to measure the world. One of them, the Prussian aristocrat Alexander von Humboldt, negotiates savannas and jungle, travels down the Orinoco River, tastes poisons, climbs the highest mountain known to man, counts head lice, and explores every hole in the ground. The other, the barely socialized mathematician and astronomer Carl Friedrich Gauss, does not even need to leave his home in Göttingen to prove that space is curved.

Here are the excruciatingly funny adventures of Suzanne Vale — a young film star and drug addict — who survives a rehab clinic only to rejoin the equally harrowing world of Hollywood. Out there on the edge, despair flips into hilarity, and we're left laughing as Suzanne struggles to come to terms with her various fantasylands.

The place: New York. The time: the early 1980s. The scene: the red-hot comedy clubs, very late at night. The cast: five would-be stand-up comics, their egos, and their girls. The result: a downright hilarious novel about trying to be funny for fame, fortune, and fornication. This is Bill Maher's report from the front, a stageside table at the birth of the comedy boom. You'll laugh in all the right places.

Penniless and downtrodden at the loss of his wife and one of his daughters, Samuel Clemens turned to writing. The short stories and essays in Letters from the Earth find Clemens—under the pseudonym of Mark Twain—at perhaps his most quizzical and questioning state ever. Written as diary entries, Twain penned a series of letters from the point of view of a dejected angel on Earth who observes the many curious natures of man. These pieces, gathered by Twain's literary executor, feature sharp takes on the inconsistencies of Christianity and farcical criticisms of American life.

Imagine this: When the stock market crashes on the Thursday before Easter, you — an ambitious, although ineffectual and not entirely ethical young broker — are convinced that you're facing the Weekend from Hell. Before the market reopens on Monday, you must scramble and scheme to cover your butt, but there's no way you can anticipate the baffling disappearance of a 300-pound psychic, the fall from grace of a born-again monkey, or the intrusion in your life of a tattooed stranger intent on blowing your mind and most of your fuses.

Best-selling sportswriter Peter Golenbock knew Mickey Mantle, as well as many of Mantle's friends, family members, and teammates. While Mickey was a good person at heart, he had a dark side that went far beyond his well-known alcoholism and infidelities. In Golenbock's shocking and revealing first novel, 7, Mickey tells the hidden story of his life as a baseball hero and asks for forgiveness from his friends and family. In this fictional portrait, Mantle, now in heaven, needs to unburden himself of all the horrible things he did and understand for himself why he did them.

Beautiful, innocent, and generous to a fault, young Candy is thrust into an outrageous world of debauched lechers and dirty old men. Can she close the gap between people by giving fully and satisfying their sizeable needs? Come with Candy on her hilarious misadventures in this raunchy, irreverent, and wildly funny satire of pornography.

One of America's funniest comedians, Carl Reiner, tells of a young man's frustrations as a machinist's helper who tries to break into show business. The semi-autobiographical novel details the bumpy journey as the aspiring actor tries to extricate himself from his overly protective parents—and his two girlfriends. Enter Laughing is a heartwarming, laugh-out-loud, and relatable story of a young man with love in his heart and grease paint on his face—a tale that guarantees to have listeners exit laughing.

The charm of the crazy Clampett clan lives on! After striking oil on his land in the Ozarks, Jed Clampett decides the sophisticated life in Beverly Hills is just what he and his kin—Jethro Bodine, Elly May, and Granny—deserve. Humorous antics ensue when they proceed to shake up privileged society with their hayseed ways. This novelization of the film features all of the favorite characters from the original series—including uptight banker Mr. Drysdale and his prim assistant Miss Jane Hathaway.

Has Jeeves finally lost his grip? Wealthy, scatterbrained Bertie Wooster—with the aid of his ever-faithful butler, Jeeves—attempts to romantically link dreamy, soulful Gussie Fink-Nottle with soppy, sweet Madeline Bassett. But as soon as Bertie takes Gussie and Madeline's love connection into his own hands, things go disastrously wrong! Fortunately, Jeeves steps in to set matters straight. But the characters must endure tangled layers of comedic complications before they reach the invariably clever and satisfying finale.

Warning: This isn't the real thing...it's funnier! "Gerber's affectionate, giggle-inducing send-up is one giant step toward restoring the somewhat debased art form known as 'parody,'" says Sean Kelly, former editor of National Lampoon. If you love Harry Potter - or if you have had enough of him! - you've gotta hear this.

The victim of a painful past and a fatherless childhood, Dinah is searching for love that will last—or at least—a reasonable facsimile that comes with a warranty. Two years after the breakup of her marriage to the award-winning playwright, Dinah remains in limbo, not genuinely wanting him back but lacking a satisfying stand-in. She finds it hard to relinquish the "pink" girlish fantasy that a man will secure her happily ever after. When she fights to hold on to that now-extinct romance, Dinah finds herself in a variety of wild predicaments.

In vignettes both comic and sexy, the owner of a coffee shop recalls the day his first wife seemed to achieve a moment of simple perfection, while she remembers the women's softball game during which she was stricken by the beauty of the shortstop. A young couple spends hours at the coffee shop fueling the idea of their fierce love. A professor of philosophy, stopping by for a cup of coffee, makes a valiant attempt to explain what he knows to be the inexplicable workings of the human heart.