Comedy Essays

Make it easy on yourself - read John Updike in Large Print! * All Random House Large Print Editions are published in a 16-point type Golf is neither work nor play, John Updike tells us: "Golf is a trip." Golf has been the subject of many books and the province of many experts, but few have...

“If Tina Fey and David Sedaris had a daughter, she would be Maeve Higgins.” —Glamour A startlingly hilarious essay collection about one woman’s messy path to finding her footing in New York City, from breakout comedy star and podcaster Maeve Higgins Maeve Higgins was a bestselling...

A brilliant biography of one of India’s greatest poets Mirza Mohammad Asadullah Khan Ghalib began writing poetry in Persian at the age of nine and the pre-eminent poet of the time, Mir, predicted a great future for the precocious genius when he was shown his verse. But success and material...

Winner of the 2019 PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography Winner of the Lambda Literary Award for LGBTQ Nonfiction Winner of the Shilts-Grahn Triangle Award for Lesbian Nonfiction Winner of the 2019 Phi Beta Kappa Christian Gauss Award A New York Times Notable Book of 2018 A revealing...

Big Cats opens with "Charlotte," in which a young girl with a broken pelvis spies on her voluptuous neighbor during a long, hot summer night, setting the tone of irrepressible curiosity and yearning that is evident throughout the collection. In "Get Away from Me, David," a bank manager tries to...

We are all more than the worst thing we’ve ever done “Margulies tells the stories of people who have done monstrous things but are not monsters, are not forever defined by their worst acts. He writes beautifully of pain and loss, but also of redemption and transformation….A wonderfully...

A no-holds-barred look into the remarkable life and career of the prolific musician, songwriter, and producer behind Eurythmics and dozens of pop hits. Dave Stewart’s life has been a wild ride—one filled with music, constant reinvention, and the never-ending drive to create. Growing up in...

The New York Times bestselling memoir-now available as an enhanced paperback edition with a new Introduction and never-before- seen photos! In this New York Times bestseller, international superstar Ricky Martin, who has sold more than 60 million albums worldwide, opens up for the first time...

An honest, witty, and insightful memoir about what happens when your coming-of-age comes later than expected “Thanks for Waiting is the loving, wise, cuttingly funny older sister we all need in book form.”—Tara Schuster, author of Buy Yourself the F*cking Lilies Doree Shafrir spent much...

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...

This definitive and magnificent 10-volume unabridged translation is one of the rare English translations in full of the epic. Bibek Debroy makes the Mahabharata marvellously accessible to contemporary readers. Dispute over land and kingdom may lie at the heart of this story of war...

Comedy writer and middle daughter of Al Gore, Kristin Gore has written a funny and moving debut novel about life on Capitol Hill as seen through the eyes of Samantha Joyce, a twenty-six year old health care analyst to Ohio Junior Senator Robert Gary. Hard working, idealistic, extremely competent...

Sam Pulsifer, the hapless hero of this incendiary novel, has come to the end of a very long and unusual journey, and for the second time in his life he has the time to think about all the things that have and have not come to pass. The truth is, a lot of remarkable things have happened in...

From a legendary journalist with four decades of unprecedented access and untold stories, an insider’s behind-the-scenes look at the major personalities of rock and roll. Lisa Robinson has interviewed everyone from John Lennon to Bono to Patti Smith, Eminem to Lady Gaga to Jay-Z and Kanye...

The fourteen stories gathered here, which have appeared in The New Yorker, GQ, Harper's, McSweeney's, and Playboy, as well as in The O. Henry Prize Stories and Best American Stories volumes, display T. C. Boyle's imaginative muscle, emotional sensitivity and astonishing range. There are the...

An Almost Unbelievable Story of a Mother's Unconditional Love and What It Can Teach Us.This story, which tells of Kaye O'Bara's devotion to her comatose daughter, Edwarda, transcends our own experiences of love. It reminds us to look within and see where we can give unconditionally...

From comedian and journalist Faith Salie, of NPR's Wait Wait…Don't Tell Me! and CBS News Sunday Morning, a collection of daring, funny essays chronicling the author's adventures during her lifelong quest for approval Faith Salie has done it all in the name of validation. Whether she’s...

Emmy-Award winning writer and comedian Josh Gondelman’s collection of personal stories of best intentions and mixed results. Josh Gondelman knows a thing or two about trying—and failing. The Emmy Award-winning stand-up comic—dubbed a “pathological sweetheart” by the New York...

For almost a decade, beloved storyteller E. Lynn Harris has welcomed you into his family with his passionate, warm and trail-blazing novels. Now, he invites you into the most intimate world ever--his own. Since his first book Invisible Life was published in the early 1990s, New York Times...

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...