Humor Classics

The Getting of Wisdom, a wicked and satirical novel on the pain and confusion of growing up, first appeared in 1910. A century later, it has lost none of its bite. One of the most memorable characters in Australian fiction, Laura Rambotham, aged 12, enters the portals of an exclusive girls' school eager to be accepted. But this precocious country girl is snubbed and ridiculed by her fellow students, who are richer, more attractive, and more adept at dealing with life's hypocrisies.

Gussie Fink-Nottle can't quite find the pluck to ask the girl of his dreams to marry him. He consults Jeeves of course. But Bertie, feeling his lemon just as supple as his manservant's, steps in and takes over the case. What follows is a torrent of hilarious hijinks, as only PG Wodehouse can deliver.

Adrian Mole is 39 and a quarter. Due to his financial situation he has been forced to move next door to his parents. And his numerous nightly visits to the lavatory lead him to suspect prostate trouble. As his worries multiply, a phone call to his old flame ignites powerful memories and makes him wonder - is she the only one who can save him now?

Alison Hart, a medium by trade, tours the dormitory towns of London's orbital ring road with her flint-hearted sidekick, Colette, passing on messages from beloved dead ancestors. But behind her plump, smiling persona hides a desperate woman: she knows the terrors the next life holds but must conceal them from her wide-eyed clients. At the same time she is plagued by spirits from her own past, who infiltrate her body and home, becoming stronger and nastier the more she resists....

Wickedly narrated by David Stifel, and written in 1729, this satiric essay on how to solve Ireland's chronic poverty is perhaps more shocking today than when it was written. In the 1960s, when Peter O'Toole did a public reading of this piece in Dublin, he very nearly started a riot. Newspapers the following day lambasted O'Toole's "shocking bad taste." Whether shocking satire, or Monty-Pythonesque surrealism, this essay has continually managed to offend people for well over 3 centuries. Enjoy! (and Thank You!)

Things grow intense as Melody's father sends his elite guard to retrieve her; however, the redhead has no intention of just letting them do whatever they want. She must awaken a dormant bloodline. Meanwhile, Toru's crusader uncle decides to pay a visit to the mansion, and what he does changes the party forever. Clyde and his party is back, bringing the humor and fun, ass-kicking, and the rising from weak to completely unstoppable. This is the continuation of the story of Clyde and Team Stone, power-leveling to save the world, and each other, defeat deadly threats, and even dark gods.

This famous satire of life on Main Street, Gopher Prairie, mirrors with devastating honesty life on Main Streets from Albany to San Diego.

Ah, the dresses! But oh, the monotony of the Season, with its endless run of glittering balls. Even fabulously fashionable Polly Hampton - with her startling good looks and excellent social connections - is beginning to wilt under the glare. Groomed for the perfect marriage by her mother, fearsome Lady Montdore, Polly instead scandalises society by declaring her love for her uncle 'Boy' Dougdale, the Lecherous Lecturer, and promptly eloping to France. But the consequences of this union no one could quite expect.

Fanny is married to absent-minded Oxford don Alfred and content with her role as a plain, tweedy housewife. But overnight her life changes when Alfred is appointed English ambassador to Paris. In the blink of an eye, Fanny's mixing with royalty, Rothschilds and Dior-clad wives, throwing cocktail parties and having every indiscreet remark printed in tomorrow's papers.

From money-making schemes involving placing wagers on vicars to poor Bingo having to produce the village school Christmas entertainments, every one of Wodehouse’s superb short stories are guarantee to raise a smile from even the most stony-faced listener!

Mapp and Lucia is the centrepiece of E.F. Benson's series of Lucia novels - bringing together for the first time the eponymous middle-aged doyennes of polite 1930s society Miss Elizabeth Mapp and Emmeline Luca (Lucia to her friends). Lucia, recently widowed, is the newcomer to the village of Tilling and eager to wrest the reins of social supremacy from the incumbant Miss Mapp and install herself as its benevolent dictator.

Four classic episodes from the original TV series: Arrival, Songs of Praise, Easter Special and The Christmas Lunch Incident. Welcome to Dibley, a perfect village full of some perfectly peculiar people - including Alice Tinker and her underactive brain, Owen Newitt and his overactive bowels, and Letitia Cropley and her orange cake with Branston pickle icing.

Nancy Mitford's first novel, a set of completely incompatible and hilariously eccentric characters collide in a Scottish castle. Inspired by Mitford's youthful infatuation with a Scottish aristocrat, her story follows young Jane Dacre to a shooting party at Dulloch Castle, where she tramps around a damp and chilly moor on a hunting expedition with formidable Lady Prague, xenophobic General Murgatroyd, one-eyed Admiral Wenceslaus and an assortment of other ancient and gouty peers of the realm, while falling in love with Albert, a surrealist painter with a mischievous sense of humour.

With a witty introduction tracing the history of this beloved joke back to 1847, Thorne's collection builds to the ultimate question: Why did one thousand chickens cross the road? The answer might just surprise you... or not!

Containing drafts of stories later rewritten for other collections (including Carry On, Jeeves), My Man Jeeves offers a fascinating insight into the genesis of comic literature’s most celebrated double-act. All the stories are set in New York, four of them featuring Jeeves and Wooster themselves; the rest concerning Reggie Pepper, an earlier version of Bertie.

“I’m a virgin. And you need to relieve me of that.” What respectable guy could say no to that? Yeah, she was my best friend. But she was also the hottest chick I’d ever known. I thought it would be simple. I thought we’d have a good time, then pretend like it never happened. It turns out, I was an idiot. Now, she wants nothing to do with me, but I’m determined. I’ve spent the last five years without her, and I refuse to waste another day.

At the mercy of an unknown entity, Clyde gets tossed into the anime world. Yes, it exists, we just don't know it. There, he's declared the Stone, the anime main character. One day, he must kill the Viper, or else it's good-bye, Earth. This is the comedic tale of a young man vs. cliche anime tropes.

Un grupo de niños encuentra un cadáver flotando en las aguas turbias de un canal de riego cercano a la ranchería de La Matosa. El cuerpo resulta ser de la Bruja, una mujer que heredó dicho oficio de su madre fallecida, y a quienes los pobladores de esa zona rural respetaban y temían. Tras el macabro hallazgo, las sospechas y habladurías recaerán sobre un grupo de muchachos del pueblo, a quienes días antes una vecina vio mientras huían de casa de la hechicera, cargando lo que parecía ser un cuerpo inerte.

June 1957. One hot afternoon in the backwaters of the Deep South, a young black farmer named Tucker Caliban salts his fields, shoots his horse, burns his house, and heads north with his wife and child. His departure sets off an exodus of the state’s entire black population, throwing the established order into brilliant disarray. Told from the points of view of the white residents who remained, A Different Drummer stands, decades after its first publication in 1962, as an extraordinary and prescient triumph of satire and spirit.

Octave Mirbeau donne la parole à Célestine, une chambrière, qui perçoit le monde par le trou de la serrure et ne laisse rien échapper des "bosses morales" de ses maîtres. Le lecteur pénètre au cœur de la réalité cachée de la société, dans les arrière-boutiques des nantis, dans les coulisses du théâtre du "beau" monde. Octave Mirbeau arrache le masque de respectabilité des puissants, fouille dans leur linge sale, débusque les crapuleries camouflées derrière les manières et les grimaces avantageuses.