Humor Classics

More teetering tales and quirky characters from the 30th floor of towering Wayside School. The craziness continues.

When an industrial accident unleashes an "airborne toxic event", a lethal black chemical cloud floats over the Gladneys' lives. The menacing cloud is a more urgent and visible version of the "white noise" engulfing the Gladneys - radio transmissions, sirens, microwaves, ultrasonic appliances, and TV murmurings - pulsing with life yet suggesting something ominous.

Tom Wolfe's best-selling modern classic tells the story of Sherman McCoy, an elite Wall Street bond trader who has it all: wealth, power, prestige, a Park Avenue apartment, a beautiful wife, and an even more beautiful mistress - until one wrong turn sends Sherman spiraling downward into a humiliating fall from grace. A car accident in the Bronx involving Sherman, his girlfriend, and two young lower-class Black men sets a match to the incendiary racial and social tensions of 1980s New York City.

Published in 1945, Cannery Row focuses on the acceptance of life as it is: both the exuberance of community and the loneliness of the individual. Drawing on his memories of the real inhabitants of Monterey, California, Steinbeck interweaves the stories of Doc, Henri, Mack and his boys, and the other characters in this world where only the fittest survive, to create a novel that is at once one of his most humorous and most poignant works.

Age has done everything except mellow the characters in Kingsley Amis’s The Old Devils, which turns its humane and ironic gaze on a group of Welsh married couples who have been spending their golden years—when “all of a sudden the evening starts starting after breakfast”—nattering, complaining, reminiscing, and, above all, drinking. This more or less orderly social world is thrown off-kilter, however, when two old friends unexpectedly return from England: Alun Weaver, now a celebrated man of Welsh letters, and his entrancing wife, Rhiannon.

A month has passed since Martin helped to defeat the evil programmer Jimmy, and things couldn't be going better. Except for his love life, that is. Feeling distant and lost, Gwen has journeyed to Atlantis, a tolerant and benevolent kingdom governed by the Sorceresses, and a place known to be a safe haven to all female time-travelers.

Collected here are eleven of Wodehouse's Jeeves and Wooster short stories (comprising all of the Jeeves tales from "Carry On, Jeeves" and "My Man Jeeves") as well as the complete novels Right Ho, Jeeves and The Inimitable Jeeves. Along with Jeeves and Bertie, we are introduced to an entire cast of beloved Wodehouse characters: Gussie Fink-Nottle, Madeline Bassett, Bingo Little, James "Corky" Corcoran, Tuppy and Honoria Glossop, Rockmetteller Todd, and the terrifying and bombastic Aunt Agatha.

Galapagos takes the listener back one million years to AD 1986. A simple vacation cruise suddenly becomes an evolutionary journey. Thanks to an apocalypse, a small group of survivors stranded on the Galapagos Islands are about to become the progenitors of a brave, new, totally different human race. Kurt Vonnegut, America's master satirist, looks at our world and shows us all that is sadly, madly awry - and all that is worth saving.

Vainqueur Knightsbane is your average dragon: A giant, fire-breathing lizard who loves to take naps on his golden hoard, kidnap princesses for fun, and make the life of adventurers miserable. Vainqueur's only pleasure in life is to watch his treasure get bigger, one coin at a time. So when a would-be thief turned unwilling minion tells him about "classes", "levels", and "quests", Vainqueur wonders if maybe, just maybe, he should consider a career change. After all, why bother hunting monsters for free when you can get paid for it?

Kurt Vonnegut's first novel spins the chilling tale of engineer Paul Proteus, who must find a way to live in a world dominated by a supercomputer and run completely by machines. Paul's rebellion is vintage Vonnegut – wildly funny, deadly serious, and terrifyingly close to reality.

Timothy Walter Bolton - better known as Timmy - has spent most of his life as a necromancer. When he isn't terrorising his enemies, he's plotting inside his castle, which is built on top of lightless chasms filled with nameless horrors and beings of a generally malevolent and megalomaniacal nature. But after one of his latest creations, a zombie hydra-dragon-bear, tries to eat him, he decides that maybe it's time to find a new, less dangerous, career.

Set adrift by his pirate crew, Pocket of Dog Snogging - last seen in The Serpent of Venice - washes up on the sun-bleached shores of Greece, where he hopes to dazzle the Duke with his comedic brilliance and become his trusted fool. But the island is in turmoil. Egeus, the Duke’s minister, is furious that his daughter Hermia is determined to marry Demetrius, instead of Lysander, the man he has chosen for her. The Duke decrees that if, by the time of the wedding, Hermia still refuses to marry Lysander, she shall be executed...or consigned to a nunnery.

Flann O'Brien's most popular and surrealistic novel concerns an imaginary, hellish village police force and a local murder.

Weird, satirical, and very funny, its popularity has suddenly increased with the mention of the novel in the TV series Lost.

24/7 Demon Mart: Publisher's Pack features two books from the 24/7 Demon Mart series: The Graveyard Shift, book one, and Monster Burger, book two. It also includes the bonus Hell for the Holidays, a 24/7 Demon Mart Christmas special. Lloyd Wallace is the most clueless crossing guard the intersection of hell and earth has ever seen. So clueless, that he doesn't even realize the beer cave in the corner store where he works is the gateway to hell.

Putting the Grand Quest behind them, the party rides onward in search of answers. Between one member's unexpected new condition and the mysteries of the Bridge, their only hope appears to be gaining entrance to Lumal, said to hold the greatest collection of knowledge in all the kingdoms. But when a curious path appears in a seemingly uninhabited forest, the party finds themselves in a place set apart from the kingdoms, and the world at large: a hidden hamlet, filled by unusual people, all of whom have long histories of their own.

This is the story of Jim Dixon, a hapless lecturer in medieval history at a provincial university who knows better than most that “there was no end to the ways in which nice things are nicer than nasty ones.” Kingsley Amis’s scabrous debut leads the audience through a gallery of emphatically English bores, cranks, frauds, and neurotics with whom Dixon must contend in one way or another in order to hold on to his cushy academic perch and win the girl of his fancy.

A masterpiece of satire, this classic has entertained and enlightened readers the world over with its sly and ironic portrayal of human life from the vantage point of Screwtape, a highly placed assistant to "Our Father Below". At once wildly comic, deadly serious, and strikingly original, C. S. Lewis gives us the correspondence of the worldly-wise old devil to his nephew Wormwood, a novice demon in charge of securing the damnation of an ordinary young man. The Screwtape Letters is the most engaging and humorous account of temptation - and triumph over it - ever written.

Switters is a contradiction for all seasons: an anarchist who works for the government, a pacifist who carries a gun, a vegetarian who sops up ham gravy, a cyberwhiz who hates computers, a robust bon vivant who can be as squeamish as any fop, a man who, though obsessed with the preservation of innocence, is aching to deflower his high-school-age stepsister (only to become equally enamored of a nun ten years his senior). Yet there is nothing remotely wishy-washy about Switters. He doesn't merely pack a pistol. He is a pistol.

At first, high school freshmen Rex McClendon and Leif Nelson believe what they’ve been told - that local students’ strange demises at Whitewood, a local reformatory, were all tragic accidents. But when the shoot for their low-budget horror masterpiece, PolterDog, goes horribly awry - and their best friend, Alicia Boykins, is sent to Whitewood - Rex and Leif are forced to question everything they know about their unassuming hometown and its cherished school for delinquents.

Low-life writer and unrepentant alcoholic Henry Chinaski was born to survive. After decades of slacking off at low-paying dead-end jobs, blowing his cash on booze and women, and scrimping by in flea-bitten apartments, Chinaski sees his poetic star rising at last. Now, at 50, he is reveling in his sudden rock-star life, running three hundred hangovers a year, and maintaining a sex life that would cripple Casanova.