Comedy Humor World

In A Vulgar Art, Ian Brodie uses a folkloristic approach to stand-up comedy, engaging the discipline's central method of studying interpersonal, artistic communication and performance. Because stand-up comedy is a rather broad category, people who study it often begin by relating it to something they recognize - "literature" or "theatre"; "editorial" or "morality" - and analyze it accordingly. A Vulgar Art begins with a more fundamental observation: Someone is standing in front of a group of people, talking to them directly, and trying to make them laugh.

Daphne Maritch doesn't quite know what to make of the heavily annotated high school yearbook she inherits from her mother, who held this relic dear. Too dear. The late June Winter Maritch was the teacher to whom the class of '68 had dedicated its yearbook, and in turn she went on to attend every reunion, scribbling notes and observations after each one - not always charitably - and noting who overstepped boundaries of many kinds. In a fit of decluttering (the yearbook did not, Daphne concluded, "spark joy"), she discards it when she moves to a small New York City apartment.

At 27, Naomi is just trying to be a normal person. A normal person who works at the Museum of Jewish Heritage, who cares for lost things, found things, sacred things and her family. A person who finds herself going on bad blind dates, having cringe-worthy sex, a tumultuous, toxic affair, and falling for a man called Moses.

Since her arrival in the US from Venezuela, Valentina Goldman isn't exactly living the American dream. She is living the American nightmare. Her late husband, Max, has left her a young widow, an angry ex-wife who is keeping the secret of Max's untimely departure, plus an American step-daughter Valentina cannot figure out.

From filmmaker and New Yorker contributor Susanna Fogel comes a comedic novel about a fractured family of New England Jews and their discontents. Told entirely in letters to a heroine we never meet, we get to know the Fellers through their check-ins with Julie over the course of three decades: their thank-you notes, letters of condolence, family gossip, and good old-fashioned familial passive-aggression.

Farahad Zama's debut novel transports listeners to faraway India for a story brimming with endearing characters, homespun wisdom, and blossoming love. After Mr. Ali retires, he launches a matchmaking service that helps an array of clients arrange marriages. But he's unaware of his able assistant's dire need for his marriage bureau.

Oliver Vice, 41, prominent philosopher, scholar, and art collector, is missing and presumed dead, over the side of Queen Mary 2. Troubled by his friend’s possible suicide, the unnamed narrator of Lawrence Douglas’ new novel launches an all-consuming investigation into Vice’s life history. Douglas, moving backward through time, tells a mordantly humorous story of fascination turned obsession, as his narrator peels back the layers of the Vice family’s rich and bizarre history.

Rabbi Jerry Goldkorn resides in Lud, New Jersey, where Jews from the surrounding states come to bury their dead. Distressed by the lack of living children in the area, the Rabbi's daughter Connie creates a scandal that livens up the town of Lud when she testifies to meeting the Virgin Mary

A multilayered masterpiece of fevered imagination and eroticism, Liebestod soars as the consummate work by one of America's greatest comic geniuses. As hilarious as it is heartbreaking, Liebestod returns us to Leslie Epstein’s most compelling literary character, that European emigrant and meagerly successful musician, Leib Goldkorn, whose final years as a randy centenarian in New York City end in one of the most memorable swan songs in recent fiction.

Okano, a convenience store employee with a troubled past, is but one of the many unforgettable characters found in this collection of four stories. Among the others are three boys facing a frightening lesson in mortality, a woman using garbage to fill a hole in her heart, and a nurse struggling to cope with the oft-brutal cycle of birth, life, and death. Remaining constant even as it fades in and out of view is the great Mount Fuji, one of Japan’s Three Holy Mountains. It serves as the anchor for these characters’ lives, and for Randy Taguchi’s Fujisan, an exploration of redemption, discovery, loss, and remembrance.

Adam Gorozpe, a respected businessman in Mexico, has a life so perfect that he might as well be his namesake in the Garden of Eden - but there are snakes in this Eden too. For one thing, Adam's wife, Priscila, has fallen in love with the brash director of national security - also named Adam. Another unlikely snake is the little Boy-God who's started preaching in the street wearing a white tunic and stick-on wings, inspiring Adam's brother-in-law to give up his job to follow this junior deity and implore Adam to do the same.

The United States prides itself on being the world’s melting pot, but during a long, hot summer in coastal North Carolina, three young people will put that theory to the test. A German named Tillmann is vacationing in the States with his girlfriend and corresponding with an African American colleague about the evolution of blues music.

La vida de Lazarillo de Tormes y de sus fortunas y adversidades, de autor anónimo, es una de las mejores obras de la picaresca española. En ella, Lázaro de Tormes nos relata su niñez y su adolescencia, los diferentes amos a los que sirvió, y lo que aprendió en su lucha por sobrevivir. Una novela llena de crítica a la sociedad de su tiempo, de penas y alegrías...y, sobre todo, de ingenio. Literaudio te ofrece las obras cumbres de la literatura española e hispanoamericana en formato audiolibro.

From the No1 Bestselling author who brought you Gucci Gucci Co, Neurotica and A Catered Affair comes a hilarious new novel about falling in love, hating your job, and getting what you want out of life - without ever smudging your lipstick! When it comes to men, beauty columnist Rebecca Fine always seems to be on the scruffy end of the mascara wand. But all that changes the morning she meets Max Stoddart, her new colleague at the Daily Vanguard.

Esta novela constituye un momento afortunado del Siglo de Oro de la literatura espanola. No solo fue uno de los mas apreciados logros en la literatura picaresca, sino tambien una de las obras fundadoras del genero novelistico. Por medio de la narracion de simples travesuras, el autor dio a su personaje Lazaro, la voz adecuada para retratar los defectos y las miserias de los grupos y clases sociales espanolas de la epoca.

An all-Jewish basketball team barnstorms across Depression-era America, confronting prejudice and point-shaving in this “some-times agonizing, frequently hilarious” novel (Chicago Tribune) by “the game’s foremost chronicler” (Wall Street Journal).

As a police launch speeds across Miami's Biscayne Bay - with officer Nestor Camacho on board - Tom Wolfe is off and running. Here is a big, panoramic story of the new America, as told by our master chronicler of the way we live now. Based on the same sort of detailed, on-scene, high-energy reporting that powered Tom Wolfe's previous best-selling novels, Back to Blood is another brilliant, spot-on, scrupulous, and often hilarious reckoning with our times.

The late Binodini Thakur had been very clear that she would never agree to sell her hissa in her Bauji's big old house on Hailey Road. And her daughter, Bonu, is determined to honor her mothers wishes. But what to do about her four pushy aunts who are insisting she sell?

Israel Bond may seem like a simple-if-sexy salesman for Mother Margolies' Old World Chicken Soup, but when the Holy Land needs his skills - his quickness with a pun, his second-to-none semitic seduction techniques, and (if absolutely necessary) his abilities at actual espionage - then the man known by the code name Oy-Oy-7 (licensed not only to kill, but to say prayers over the corpse) is there to do what needs be done. In a land surrounded by its enemies, Oy-Oy-7 is called on to guard the nation's great benefactor, the generous but odd Lazarus Loxfinger.

At the center of The Lawgiver is Margo Solovei, a brilliant young writer-director who has rejected her rabbinical father’s strict Jewish upbringing to pursue a career in the arts. When an Australian multi-billionaire promises to finance a movie about Moses if the script meets certain standards, Margo does everything she can to land the job, including a reunion with her estranged first love, an influential lawyer with whom she still has unfinished business. Two other key characters in the novel are Herman Wouk himself and his wife of more than 60 years, Betty Sarah, who, almost against their will, find themselves entangled in the Moses movie .