Dark Comedy Short Stories

Hollywood and Broadway are icons of the American Dream. But what happens to those who feed off that dream? Just as drug cartels have many underlings who must get paid along the journey to the addicts, so do the characters who need to be nourished by the luminaries who make up this star-studded world above us. James Musgrave’s collection of 11 stories, in many ways, addresses the theme of “star power”, but in a way that satirizes the stereotypical “Hollywood endings” in very unique and literary ways.

Bubba’s back from Fairyland, and sometimes it feels like they shoulda just stayed there! Man, coming back to the real world sucks. Bubba and his whole team have been fired on account of going MIA for a year and a half (yeah, time moves differently in Fairyland - yay), and now they’ve got to…get jobs? Oh, this is going to go well.

This is a collection of short stories in the Caverns and Creatures series. It includes the following titles: "They Fight Three Giants", "From the Bowels of Hell Hounds", "Tossing the Salaad", "The Fuccubus", "Fistin' the Furious", and "Pixie Dicks".

This is a collection of the third six short stories in the Caverns and Creatures series.

An accountant by day, Mr. Rodgers spends his nights and weekends indulging in a unique passion. Traveling from neighborhood to neighborhood as an unknown entity, he uses unconventional methods to help long-suffering wives rediscover the love they once had for themselves and their husbands. Some might consider him a selfless hero, ahead of his time. The residents of Poagstown, however, have cutting-edge ideas of their own.

This is a collection of the eighth six short stories in the Caverns & Creatures series. It includes the following titles: This Poo Shall Pass, Hung Ogre, Fortune Favors the Kobold, Asses to Asses, Love on the Rocs, and The Winds of Cooper. If you've already purchased all of these books, there is nothing new for you here. If you haven't yet purchased any, you can save a few bucks by buying this collection. If you've only purchased some of these already, you'll have to do some math.

Nobody likes getting bullied, and Donny has had enough. Deciding to take matters into his own hands, he solicits the help of the old Asian man at the end of his street to teach him Karate. During a grueling two days of training, Donny earns belt after belt, until he finally becomes a Karate Master.

For sheer unpredictable brilliance, Gogol may come to mind, but no author alive today takes a listener as far as Helen DeWitt into the funniest, most yonder dimensions of possibility. Her jumping-off points might be statistics, romance, the art world’s piranha tank, games of chance and games of skill, the travails of publishing, or success.

Nada Alic's women—the perverts, nobodies, reality TV stars, poetic hopefuls, shameless party girls, and self-help addicts of Los Angeles and its environs—are all wrestling with a shared stark reality: the modern world. To cope, they live in their baddest thoughts: the lush, strange landscape of female make-believe.

An urgent and unforgettable collection of stories, Show Them a Good Time explores types - men and women, their assigned roles and meanings - in modern society. A young, broke Irish woman narrates her relationship with a successful comedian in New York; two hapless university students take to the stage in a bid to assert their autonomy; a school teacher makes her way through a series of dead-end dates, gamely searching for love or distraction as the world teeters towards ruin.

These 11 stories by Joshua Ferris, many of which were first published in The New Yorker, are at once thrilling, strange, and comic. The modern tribulations of marriage, ambition, and the fear of missing out as the temptations flow like wine and the minutes of life tick down are explored with the characteristic wit and insight that have made Ferris one of our most critically acclaimed novelists.

In steel-tipped prose, Craig Davidson conjures up a bleak world populated by hardscrabble pugilists, fighting dogs, sex addicts, and others held captive by their own bad luck and bad decisions. Visceral and with a dark urgency, Rust and Bone is a strikingly original debut.

"Stranger's Thing" by Robert Bevan: Four friends get more than they bargained for when they break into a seemingly abandoned research lab. "The Shingling" by Steve Wetherell: Johnny Terry, a recovering meth addict, is excited to start his new life as the caretaker at the Underpass Motel. Unfortunately, the Underpass is haunted by the ghosts of dead porn stars. "The Haunting of Whore House" by Robert Bevan: Lucy and her brother, Junkie, find out that moving was only the beginning of their troubles when they encounter the ghost of a little boy in the woods. Plus three more!

Con una prosa ágil, desinhibida y acertada, Rafael Medina nos entrega estos relatos en los que se vale del humor negro para poner ante nosotros, con tonos de retrato más que de denuncia, historias que fácilmente podrían estar sucediendo en este momento a unas cuantas cuadras de nosotros, pero vistos bajo la mirada del "arte de su tiempo" que Medina utiliza con sutiles atisbos de crítica.

This series of short, fictional vignettes explores our day-to-day interactions with an ever-elusive and arbitrary God. It's the Book of Common Prayer as seen through a looking glass - a powerfully vivid collection of seemingly random life moments. The figures that haunt these stories range from Kafka (talking to a fish) to the Aztecs, Tolstoy to Abraham and Sarah, O. J. Simpson to a pack of wolves. Most of Williams' characters, however, are like the rest of us.

From the award-winning author of Occupational Hazards come nine more tales of blue-collar fiction, including The Destroyer (sequel to Jar Baby) and the author's autobiographical Memoir of a Murderer, narrated by an all-star cast of performers. There's horror, there's humor, there's horrific humor. It slices, it dices, it makes julienne fries. Treat yourself. You deserve it.

The characters in this extraordinary book are often - on the surface - depraved, vicious, cowardly and manipulative, but their essential humanity is never undermined. Two professors of philosophy turn pugilists; Leith removal men become the objects of desire for Hollywood goddesses; God turns Boab Coyle into a house-fly; and in the novella, 'A Smart Cunt', the drug-addled young hero spins off on a collision course with his past.

It’s bad enough that its venom-dripping chelicerae can slice through flesh like warm butter. Worse? It’s right there under the bunk. It’s a fact now. To make it through the night, the children must obey the rules: don’t get out of bed, stay out of the shadows, and don’t wake the beast. But as the threats multiply, so do the rules of survival. And with the safety of dawn still hours away, the fun is just beginning.

It’s Easter in the land of Oz, and while Jack Pumpkinhead should be enjoying the lovely spring weather, Easter eggs, and candy with his new friend, little Jenny, he can’t. Something is wrong. A terrible memory is beginning to resurface, and Jack is terrified. Whatever it is, he knows it has chased after him for a long time and that he is not strong enough to face it. But very soon, Jack will discover that you can’t hide from the truth forever....

Q: What do a set of LEGO toys, a mountain of cocaine, a glitter-dusted stripper, and a monkey who's grown tired of his dead-end day job have in common? A: Absolutely nothing. Except that they're all key elements in some of the stories featured in this dark and funny collection.