Historical Humor

When you haven't had sex in a long time, it feels like the worst thing that could ever happen to anyone. If you're living in Germany in the 1930s, it probably isn't. But that's no consolation to Egon Loeser, whose carnal misfortunes will push him from the experimental theatres of Berlin to the absinthe bars of Paris to the physics laboratories of Los Angeles, trying all the while to solve two mysteries: whether it was really a deal with Satan that claimed the life of his hero and why a guy like him can't get himself laid.

L.A. Woman is quintessential Babitz, the story of Sophie, a 20-something blonde Jim Morrison groupie gliding through a golden existence in L.A.; and Lola, a German immigrant who settles in Hollywood in the '20s to drive Pierce Arrows recklessly down Sunset Boulevard and who knows that Maybelline mascara cakes and that Rudolph Valentino is the essence of life. Sophie and Lola, like the many other women who move in and out of this electric saga, know that while L.A. is constantly changing, it is essentially eternal.

Delphine Delacroix has lived the life of bird in a gilded cage, kept in a stately home with only her cold autocratic mother for company. At her mother’s death, she finds herself to be a wealthy woman and comes to London to be fretted over by her three maternal aunts determined to have her marry well. But Delphine feels she is once more having to hand herself over to another’s will and seeks to be the mistress of her own destiny.

It’s the summer of 1982 and fourteen-year-old Swanna Swain is the only one left at camp. The place is a ghost town by the time her mother Val finally shows up six hours late—stoned and radiant—in a Ford pickup driven by Borislav, her new young Russian lover. Assuming she is headed home to her air-conditioned Upper West Side apartment, Swanna and her lovable younger brother Madding are instead dragged to Vermont—to an artist colony where kids are not welcome and they are forced to sleep in the back of the truck, while Val is cozy inside the house with the Russian.

Uptight elfin historian Brangwain Spurge is on a mission: survive being catapulted across the mountains into goblin territory, deliver a priceless peace offering to their mysterious dark lord, and spy on the goblin kingdom - from which no elf has returned alive in more than 100 years. Brangwain's host, the goblin archivist Werfel, is delighted to show Brangwain around. They should be the best of friends, but a series of extraordinary double crosses, blunders, and cultural misunderstandings throws these two bumbling scholars into the middle of an international crisis.

Sudden Death begins with a brutal tennis match that could decide the fate of the world. The bawdy Italian painter Caravaggio and the loutish Spanish poet Quevedo battle it out before a crowd that includes Galileo, Mary Magdalene, and a generation of popes who would throw Europe into the flames. In England, Thomas Cromwell and Henry VIII behead Anne Boleyn, and her crafty executioner transforms her legendary locks into the most sought-after tennis balls of the time.

In this very funny audiobook, Bobs gives us his opinions on everything from fireworks to frogs, cats to Christmas, in his own words. This collection of his letters takes us through a year in the life of Bobs, the adored pet terrier owned by national treasure Enid Blyton.

Amid the political turmoil of the French Revolution, another revolution is taking place, an ambitious project to remeasure the Paris meridian, thus determining the precise distance from the North Pole to the equator in order to calculate a new base unit of length - the meter - establishing a rational system of measurement based on nature that will unite all people of all nations for all time.

From the publisher of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies comes a new tale of romance, heartbreak, and tentacled mayhem. Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters expands the original text of the beloved Jane Austen novel with all-new scenes of giant lobsters, rampaging octopi, two-headed sea serpents, and other biological monstrosities.

Donald Cameron, a young Scotsman, is commissioned to write a book on the outsider's view of the English. He sets about his task with enthusiasm, encountering along the way an array of richly comical characters including civil servants, newspaper editors, minor poets, a glamourous movie star, politicians, and many more. This satire of English eccentricity has become a classic of 20th century literature.

In 1977, Ickey Jerusalem, San Francisco’s golden-boy poet laureate (based on Blake), is found dead in a locked, first-class toilet on an arriving red-eye flight. Ded Smith, a desperately unhappy, intelligent philistine with a highly developed philosophy to match, is called in to investigate the poet’s death. Thus begins a series of hilarious encounters with the members of Jerusalem’s coterie (updated amalgams of characters from Blake’s work).

While transporting a woman to an insane asylum, Deputy Kopp discovers something deeply troubling about her story. Before she can investigate, another inmate bound for the asylum breaks free and tries to escape. In both cases, Constance runs instinctively toward justice. But the fall of 1916 is a high-stakes election year, and any move she makes could jeopardize Sheriff Heath's future - and her own. Although Constance is not on the ballot, her controversial career makes her the target of political attacks.

On a hot summer day some 20 years after he was famously converted to kindness, Ebenezer Scrooge still roams the streets of London, spreading Christmas cheer, much to the annoyance of his creditors, his nephew, and his employee, Bob Cratchit. However, when Scrooge decides to help his old friend and former partner, Jacob Marley, as well as other inhabitants of the city, he will need the assistance of the very people he's annoyed. He'll also have to call on the three ghosts that visited him two decades earlier.

The author of the acclaimed Crooked Heart returns with a comic, charming, and surprisingly timely portrait of a once-pioneering suffragette trying to find her new passion in post-WWI-era London.

Timothy (later St. Timothy) is in his study in Thessalonika, where he is bishop of Macedonia. It is A.D. 96, and Timothy is under terrific pressure to record his version of the Sacred Story, since, far in the future, a cyberpunk (the Hacker) has been systematically destroying the tapes that describe the Good News, and Timothy's Gospel is the only one immune to the Hacker's deadly virus.

Oliver Dasenby is the most infuriating man Primrose Garland has ever known. He may be her brother's best friend, but he has an atrocious sense of humor. Eight years in the cavalry hasn't taught him solemnity, nor has the unexpected inheritance of a dukedom. But when Oliver inherited his dukedom, it appears that he also inherited a murderer. Oliver might be dreadfully annoying, but Primrose doesn't want him dead. She's going to make certain he survives his inheritance - and the only way to do that is to help him catch the murderer!

Contains books three and four of the Richard Jackson Saga, a coming-of-age adventure series: Hollywood and In the Movies.

Contains books one and two of the Richard Jackson Saga, a coming-of-age adventure series: The Beginning, book 1, and The School Days, book 2. Follow our young hero as he goes through life in the late 1950s, adventure after adventure, large and small. Starting in the summer before his freshman year, the story follows him through his high school life. He finds fame and fortune as an inventor, and wealth in Hollywood as he searches for a girlfriend (...wealth and fame prove far easier to obtain than girls).

Cette guerre inventée entre l'homme et l'animal c'est, en 1936, tout ce que le monde embrase : le nazisme, l'antisémitisme, la croyance dans le progrès ; ce livre brosse avec humour une satire des hommes et de leur société. Mêlant la parodie au fantastique, à la fois roman et conte philosophique, il se révèle, sous une apparente légèreté, extrêmement lucide et sombre. Étonnamment perspicace quant au devenir de l'Europe quelques années plus tard, "La Guerre des Salamandres" anticipe également les problèmes écologiques.

First published in 1873, The Gilded Age is both a biting satire and a revealing portrait of post-Civil War America - an age of corruption when crooked land speculators, ruthless bankers, and dishonest politicians voraciously took advantage of the nation's peacetime optimism. With his characteristic wit and perception, Mark Twain and his collaborator, Charles Dudley Warner, attack the greed, lust, and naiveté of their own time in a work that endures as a valuable social document and one of America's most important satirical novels.