Humor Anthology

Every nosy neighbor, gossipy friend, and meddling relative is just one good mystery away from becoming a detective. From behind locked doors or out in broad daylight, driven by chance or curiosity, amateur sleuths get in over their heads in these six hair-raising, hilarious stories.

"Isn't so and so a snob?" he asks. "She won't even admit she liked Grease." Looking for an author who ponders the imponderable, expresses the inexpressible, describes the indescribable, and leaves no burning issue of American popular culture or world concern unexamined? Well, you'll find him in Mark Leyner. On this recording, Leyner, one of the most gifted and original young American writers around, reads 6 prose pieces from his first published book.

Kevin Wilson’s characters inhabit a world that moves seamlessly between the real and the imagined, the mundane and the fantastic. “Grand Stand-In” is narrated by an employee of the Nuclear Family Supplemental Provider—a company that supplies “stand-ins” for families with deceased, ill, or plain mean grandparents. And in “Blowing Up On the Spot,” a young woman works sorting tiles at a Scrabble factory after her parents have spontaneously combusted. These wonderfully inventive stories explore the relationship between loss and death and the ways we try to cope with both.

Stephen Leacock (1869-1944) may be considered the Canadian counterpart to Mark Twain. For many years he was professor of economics at Magill University and published a number of well-regarded texts on economics and political science. However, he is best known today for his many volumes of humorous fiction. During the 1920s he was one of the most widely read authors in the English-speaking world and was considered by Jack Benny and Groucho Marx to be one of the greatest comic writers of all time.

The first volume of Wodehouse's brilliant complete and unabridged short stories. Originally a semi-novel, this version contains self-contained stories which are nonetheless linked, often by Bingo Little, an endearingly hopeless chap and a serial romancer.

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.

Recipe for drunken laughter: take two best friends since childhood; add four shots of tequila each; sprinkle in a handful of secrets; shake.

Classic warped and wonderful stories from a “genius” (The New York Times) and master storyteller. Brief, intense, painfully funny, and shockingly honest, Etgar Keret’s stories are snapshots that illuminate with intelligence and wit the hidden truths of life. As with the best writers of fiction, hilarity and anguish are the twin pillars of his work. Keret covers a remarkable emotional and narrative terrain - from a father’s first lesson to his boy to a standoff between soldiers caught up in the Middle East conflict to a slice of life where nothing much happens.

A collection of absurdist and thought-provoking stories from the author's Return to the Dirt, Just Speculating, and more, including unreleased, exclusive, audio-only content! Performed by a cast of award-winning and Audie® nominated narrators. Fans of the macabre, dark humor, and cerebral thrillers are guaranteed a good listen. Occupational Hazards is an unflinching ride through the absurdity of it all. Existentialism, absurdism, and outlandish humor merge with ordinary, workaday life for a truly unique perspective of the human experience. Not recommended for the faint of heart or easily offended. But if meaty stories are what you're after....We hope you're hungry.

Eighteen of the very best American short stories, each a classic in its own right. Stories include "The Little Frenchman and his Water Lots", by George Pope Morris; "The Angel of the Odd", by Edgar Allan Poe; "The Schoolmasters’s Progress", by Caroline M.S. Kirkland; "The Watkinson Evening", by Eliza Leslie; "Titbottom’s Spectacles", by George William Curtis; "My Double and "How He Undid Me", by Edward Everett Hale; "A Visit to the Asylum for Aged and Decayed Punsters", by Oliver Wendell; and more.

For former pushover Janet, her Sophie curls appear to be a balanced and beautiful new addition to her magical, life-changing wig collection. She’s positively beaming, has smoothed out the wrinkles in her personal life, and is embarking on a philanthropic new business venture. Everything is ideal until the unthinkable happens and she has to stand on her own - with a final push from Lady Miss Jacqueline, of course!

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.

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.

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.

Best Seller de O. Henry es un cuento humorístico que satiriza a la industria editorial. La narrativa se desarrolla cuando un autor, al intentar crear un bestseller, descubre sin darse cuenta la imprevisibilidad del gusto popular. El ingenio y la ironía de O. Henry son evidentes a medida que la historia explora la naturaleza voluble del éxito literario.

Ordinary realities and yearnings to transcend them lead to miraculous other worlds in this dazzling collection of stories. A woman's deceased father appears in her dreams with clues about the afterlife; a Russian professor in a small American town constructs elaborate fantasies during her cigarette break; a man falls in love with a marble statue as his marriage falls apart. With the emotional insight of Chekhov, the surreal satire of Gogol, and a unique blend of humor and poetry all her own, Tolstaya transmutes the quotidian into aetherial alternatives.

In You Will Never Be Forgotten, Mary South explores how technology can both collapse our relationships from within and provide opportunities for genuine connection. Formally inventive, darkly absurdist, savagely critical of the increasingly fraught cultural climates we inhabit, these 10 stories also find hope in fleeting interactions and moments of tenderness. They reveal our grotesque selfishness and our intense need for love and acceptance, and the psychic pain that either shuts us off or allows us to discover our deepest reaches of empathy.

Cette sélection des dix meilleurs contes et récits parus dans le magazine phare "Histoires pour les petits" raviront les oreilles des petits et des grands. Au programme, des histoires à écouter en famille, du doudou de papa à "Toutouné et les lunettes de mamie" en passant par "Les sept matriochkas"... Une plongée dans l'univers attachant de la famille, des relations grands-parents, parents et enfants sans oublier les histoires de fratrie !

BETRAYAL. PASSION. MAGIC. And...WIGS! From the sparkling imagination of gifted entertainer Keke Palmer and her iconic alter ego, Lady Miss Jacqueline, comes a hilarious modern fairy tale about a wilting violet, a clash of personalities, and a multitude of hair.

Jubilatoires, flamboyantes, hypnotiques, ces histoires courtes de Haruki Murakami nous plongent dans un univers délicieusement insolite et drôle, où d'une situation d'apparence anodine peuvent surgir à tout moment le fantastique et l'absurde. Des petits contes de notre quotidien, transfigurés par la poésie, l'humour et la grâce de Haruki Murakami, un charme qui agit à chaque page, comme autant de feux d'artifices en plein jour. Des petits contes de notre quotidien, transfigurés par la poésie, l'humour et la grâce de Haruki Murakami, un charme qui agit à chaque page, comme autant de feux d'artifices en plein jour.