Humor Anthology

Ever dream about writing to your favorite writer and receiving a package as a reply? What's in that package? What if you could see murders and suicides before they happened? How would you proceed? Easy answer, but what if you enjoyed it? Why is a grandmother singing about the apocalypse in the street? Most importantly, what's your good line?

O. Henry's short stories are well known for their wit, wordplay, warm characterization and clever twist endings. Includes: "By Courier", "Jimmie Hayes and Muriel", "School and Schools", "Roads of Destiny", "A Blackjack Bargainer"," A Cosmopolite in a Café", "Christmas by Injunction", "Mammon and the Archer", "A Bird of Bagdad", "After 20 Years", "From The Cabby’s Seat", "Lost on Dress Parade", "Memoirs of a Yellow Dog", "Tobin’s Palm", "Transients in Arcadia", "The Trimmed Lamp", and more.

A cheerful snack mascot who snaps under the pressure. The nightmarish effects of the most depressing holiday song of all time. A virtual-reality environment that allows you to enact your most depraved fantasies...sort of. Giant mutant cockroaches doing battle with zombies in the Old West. An unnerving discovery in the Book of Revelations. The true secret of silent comedian Buster Keaton's success. Plus a Halloween curse, a lot of psychopaths, and much more!

Clare es una adolescente normal en su primer año de preparatoria. Ansía ser aceptada, y no desea otra cosa que escapar de su realidad. Encuentra seguridad y santuario dibujando y escribiendo historias, pero cuando conoce a Sherry, comienza a combinar su necesidad de interacción humana con su gusto por la fantasía. Juntas las dos jóvenes se embarcan en una aventura en la que el subdirector, el señor Cortez, es la estrella.

Bestsellerautor Markus Heitz erzählt in dieser ganz besonderen Weihnachts-Anthologie von einem Mädchen, das nicht nur den Nikolaus das Fürchten lehrt, weil sie statt dem gewünschten X-Mas-House-Of-Horror einen rosafarbenen Pullover bekommt, vom Treiben der Unheiligen drei Könige oder dem egoistischen Weihnachts-Muffel Quentin, dem eine Kita-Theater-Truppe mit einer ganz besonderen Vorstellung die Ehrfurcht vor dem Fest einbläut. In "Der Tannenbaum des Todes" wird das Beste aus zehn Jahren eines einmaligen Weihnachts-Live-Events erstmals in einem Buch versammelt!

Tales from the Beach House is a satiric work of fiction that sharply captures the "man-bites-dog" world of contemporary South Florida. The Beach House, a crumbling old motel, is home to a collection of eccentric residents. Amongst their ranks: a tennis pro at the end of his game, a mortuary scientist whose love life has flat-lined, a paparazzo photographer searching for scoops, and more. Each member of this cohort is in search of something - fast money, an easy hustle, fleeting romance, enduring love, fame, power, dignity, happiness...a place they can call home.

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.

From an acclaimed and original writer comes a new collection of stories bursting with absurdist plot twists and laced with trenchant wit. The title story delivers a cringingly biting dissection of racial attitudes in contemporary America, and Clarke also turns his eagle eye to subjects like PTSD, the fate of child actors, and, most especially, marital discord in stories like "Considering Lizzie Borden, Her Axe, My Wife" and "The Misunderstandings".

In his first published work in prose, James Joyce paints vivid portraits of the people of Dublin, his city of birth, in a collection of stories whose larger purpose, he said, was to depict a "moral history of Ireland". From the first story, in which a young boy encounters death, to the haunting final story involving the middle-aged Gabriel, the book gives an unflinching and realistic portrayal of "dear, dirty Dublin" in the early 20th-century.

The mystique of the river life has often been romanticized but rarely scrutinized. The brotherhood of mariners who live and work the waterways of the heartland is made up of a rare breed that usually keeps to itself. Towboat Joe has broken the golden rule of "what happens on the boat stays on the boat" by inviting us to set sail on an unprecedented voyage.

Seventeen stories of small-town America that will make you laugh. Guaranteed. If you grew up in the rural Midwest, you've met big, easy-going Sheriff Tip Tungate, with his uniquely local sense of justice. You've sat in front of hulking principal Butch Bauer, who runs "the best sports program in the state", and seen his football trophies in the display case behind him. You have eaten baked beans and chocolate cake at the church carry-in supper, been embarrassed by a revival, and seen what happens in small towns to intellectuals who won't shut up.

Whether Christmas is a time of unbridled joy, a season of past reflections, or an ordeal to be endured until the return to normalcy after the New Year, its impact is pervasive in most of our lives. Everyone's feelings are super sensitized, every emotion is heightened. The happy become giddy, the sad become despondent, the lonely become lonelier – unless, yes unless – the magic of Christmas has its way. So it is for the characters in these stories.

The Basilwade stories were originally published on the CaféLit website, where you can access short stories that go nicely with a cuppa. We even suggest a drink! Dawn Knox’s stories contain characters and situations that may seem a little larger than life at first glance but we can soon see that everyone involved is very human. And don’t we all recognise the quirkiness of village/small-town life?

Centering us in Rome, but transporting us seamlessly into worlds as varied and exotic as they are emotionally real, these stories paint landscapes that are populated - vividly, hauntingly - by animals: from squawking, violent seagulls, to magical snakes, to a tiny dog on the side of a deserted road, to starlings circling the evening sky in exhilarating formation.

In The Wrong Heaven, anything is possible: bodies can transform, inanimate objects come to life, angels appear and disappear. Amy Bonnaffons draws us into a delightfully strange universe, in which her conflicted characters seek to solve their sexual and spiritual dilemmas in all the wrong places. While some of the worlds to which Bonnaffons transports us are more recognizable than others, all of them uncover the mysteries beneath the mundane surfaces of our lives. As provocative as they are deeply affecting, these stories lay bare the heart of our deepest longings.

A Mariner's Guide to Self Sabotage is populated by the lonely and alienated, holders of secrets, members (or would-be members) of shadowy organizations, screw-ups, joyriders, and runaways. Architects of their own destruction, Gaston's characters provoke an almost mythic response of simultaneous disbelief and recognition, as they painfully, deliberately, stubbornly carve a path for themselves, questioning every turn. Yet somehow, in spite of themselves, they sometimes manage to stumble into peace and even wisdom.

This book consists of 27 short stories of murder, mystery and mayhem. This is book one in a series of eight short story compilation books.

I Will Open My Mouth in Parables is a collection of fictional short stories recounting events that take place in or near the small town of Quick, West Virginia. The stories are set in the 1950's and are told in the first person by "Richie Smith."

E.E. King delivers a collection of short stories that are original, funny, and always thought provoking. From a hilarious tale of an animal activist who can't get anything right to a man tasked with writing a guidebook for heaven. These tales will delight you.

Incendiary Girls explores our baser instincts with vivid imagination and humor. In these stories, our bodies become strange and unfamiliar terrain, a medium for transformation. In "Fundamental Laws of Nature", a doctor considers her legacy, both good and bad, when she discovers that her mother has been reincarnated as a thoroughbred mare. In the title story, a mischievous angel chronicles the remarkable life of a girl just beyond death’s reach.