Humor Classics

Burdened by debt after her husband's death, Lucy Muir insists on moving into the very cheap Gull Cottage in the quaint seaside village of Whitecliff, despite multiple warnings that the house is haunted. Upon discovering the rumors to be true, the young widow ends up forming a special companionship with the ghost of handsome former sea captain Daniel Gregg. Lucy finds in her secret relationship with Captain Gregg a comfort and blossoming love she never could have predicted.

This stylish, charming, and delightfully witty comedy showcases all the reasons why P.G. Wodehouse is hailed as one of the most sharp-witted writers of the 20th century. It begins when a proper British earl falls asleep in a dentist’s chair - and wakes up in the body of America’s favorite child star.

The Infinite Future is a mind-bending novel that melds two addictive tales in one. In the first, we meet three broken people, joined by an obsession with a forgotten Brazilian science-fiction author named Salgado-MacKenzie. The motley trio sets off to discover his identity, and find his fabled masterpiece. In the second half, Wirkus gives us the lost masterpiece itself - the actual text of The Infinite Future, Salgado-MacKenzie's wonderfully weird magnum opus.

When the aliens came down and told us they’d enslave all of the human race if we didn’t send our bigliest warrior to participate in their arena death games, I laughed at them. It was really funny because they obviously didn’t know who they were dealing with. Know what I mean? Then they said they would pick the greatest warrior, and they picked Marc Havak. He seemed like such an average guy, but he was a true-blue American. He even worked as a truck driver! That’s the kind of good guy we want defending us from aliens.

Written in 1923 and originally published in France, The Great American Novel examines the impossibility of writing such work in America. Williams not only writes the novel with poetic satire and pathos but allows us into his writing process, as he strives to define a young America at the end of a World War and the beginning of the “Roaring ‘20s”.

Born in England in 1869, Stephen Leacock would immigrate to Canada and become a teacher, political scientist, and writer. He would ultimately come to be best known and loved as a humourist. Literary Lapses was first published as a collection of sketches in 1910, although many of the individual stories were first printed in various newspapers and periodicals, such as Punch, New York Life, and the Detroit Free Press.

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.

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.

Jeeves and Wooster never disappoint on audio and these unabridged stories are of course no exception. Wodehouse/Jarvis deliver another excellent audio collection featuring all your favourite characters, not forgetting our intrepid duo of course! Full Story Listings: 1. Jeeves and the Impending Doom, 2. The Inferiority Complex of Old Sippy, 3. Jeeves and the Yule-Tide Spirit, 4. Jeeves and the Song of Songs, 5. Episode of the Dog McIntosh, and 6. The Spot of Art

When recently orphaned Barnaby Gaunt is sent to stay with his uncle on a beautiful remote island off the coast of Canada, he is all set to have the perfect summer holiday. Except there is one small problem: His uncle is trying to kill him. Heir to a ten-million-dollar fortune, Barnaby tries to tell everyone and anyone that his uncle is after his inheritance, but no one will believe him. That is, until he tells the only other child on the island, Chrissie, who concludes that there is only one way for Barnaby to stop his demonic uncle: He will just have to kill him first.

It takes a lot of effort for Jimmy Crocker to become Piccadilly Jim – nights on the town roistering, headlines in the gossip columns, a string of broken hearts and breaches of promise. Eventually he becomes rather good at it and manages to go to pieces with his eyes open. But no sooner has Jimmy cut a wild swathe through fashionable London than his terrifying Aunt Nesta decides he must mend his ways. He then falls in love with the girl he has hurt most of all, and after that things get complicated. In a dizzying plot, impersonations pile on impersonations....

Raised by vampyre relatives, Jane grows to resent the lifestyle's effect on her upbringing. No sunlight, nighttime hours, and a diet of bloody red meat is no way for a mortal girl to live. Things change for Jane when the ghost of her uncle visits her, imparts her parents' slayer history, and charges her with the responsibility of striking out to find others of her kind and learn the slayer ways.

Another classic funny Jeeves and Wooster story. Bertie once again travels to Totleigh Towers to try to repair the rift in Gussie Finknottle and Madeline Basset's engagement. Pop Basset and Roderick Spode (Lord Sidcup) think he is there to steal a black amber statuette for Bertie's Uncle Tom. How could things get complicated?

Up the Down Staircase is the funny and touching story of a committed, idealistic teacher whose clash with school bureaucracy is a timeless lesson for students, teachers, parents – anyone concerned about public education. Bel Kaufman lets her characters speak for themselves through memos, letters, directives from the principal, comments by students, notes between teachers, and papers from desk drawers and wastebaskets, evoking a vivid picture of teachers fighting the good fight against all that stands in the way of good teaching.

Linbury goes green and Jennings and Darbishire want to do their bit for the environment. Given the simple task of distributing leaflets, what could go wrong? But when Darbishire’s shoelace refuses to stay tied, Jennings, using his usual initiative, removes the rubber band holding the leaflets together and performs an emergency shoelace repair. All seems fine, until a gust of wind hurls the leaflets over Marina Gardens.

Right Ho, Jeeves sees Bertie Wooster blithely attempting to assume the role of Jeeves himself as a matters-of-the-heart adviser. Very unwise: from Gussie Fink-Nottle's romance with Madeline Bassett, to Tuppy Glossop and his stop/go engagement to Angela Travers, the young master succeeds only in making a bally mess of everyone's love-lives.

These are the adventures of a naughty wooden puppet who, through many misadventures, learns what it takes to become a real boy.

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.

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.

P.G. Wodehouse, the master of British humor, produced dozens of books and hundreds of short stories in his long and prolific career. But none of his creations has quite captured the world's imagination as much as his bumbling, empty-headed man-about-town Bertie Wooster and Bertie's faithful knight-in-shining-tuxedo Jeeves. Collected here are some of Wodehouse's most beloved Jeeves-and-Wooster tales - 10 short stories from the anthology Carry On, Jeeves as well as the novel The Inimitable Jeeves - each a master class in comedic writing.