Humor Short

As Fred the Mermaid tries to fit in with her own kind, she finds herself hooked on both Artur, the High Prince of the undersea realm, and Thomas, a hunky marine biologist. She's also caught between two factions of merfolk: those happy with swimming under the radar - and those who want to bring their existence to the surface.

From the award-winning author of Occupational Hazards come nine more tales of blue-collar fiction, including The Destroyer (sequel to Jar Baby) and the author's autobiographical Memoir of a Murderer, narrated by an all-star cast of performers. There's horror, there's humor, there's horrific humor. It slices, it dices, it makes julienne fries. Treat yourself. You deserve it.

A baby rat freed from the bottom of a dumpster becomes a white ibis wandering the wet driveway after a storm. Goodbye, hello, goodbye. It was the garbage times; it was time for something else. A tale of two tales, connected by a mysterious sunlit portal.

From the highly acclaimed author of Edisto and The Interrogative Mood, Padgett Powell's new collection of stories, Cries for Help, Various Stories, follows his mentor Donald Barthelme's advice that "wacky mode must "break their hearts". The surrealistic and comical terrain of most of the 44 stories here is grounded by a real preoccupation with longing, fear, work, loneliness, and cultural nostalgia. These universal concerns are given exhilarating life by way of Powell's "wit, his...dazzling turns of phrase" (Scott Spencer).

Seal Island is home to a moonshine-making billionaire, a pot-growing fisherman, a celebrity flower child, a handsome romance writer, a sex-addicted realtor, a womanizing pub owner, a cop, a pot-bellied pig…and a serial killer. The island is serene and remote. It is only accessible by boat. The residents like it that way, until those with the deepest and darkest of secrets start dying in the most bizarre of ways.

It's been a year since Bubba settled things with his crazy brother Jason once and for all, and what a year it's been! The third volume of collected Bubba stories contains more monsters, more inter-dimensional travel, more duels to the death, and more guitar solos than any other season of Bubba yet! Wine, Women, & Song is a collected edition including the novellas Moon over Bourbon Street, Night at the Museum, Midsummer, Oh Bubba, Where Art Thou?

The Burglars' Club is the most exclusive of exclusive Gentleman's Clubs in Victorian London. To pay their dues, members must steal something very valuable and hard to get, and present it to the club at the following meeting (They return it afterwards, of course, if possible). Full of comedy, suspense, and mystery. The award-winning Colonial Radio Theatre on the Air brings these wonderful stories to life with a full cast, music, and sound effects.

For the first time ever, hear Woody Allen’s Mere Anarchy in the author’s own distinctive and hilarious voice. Here, in his first short-story collection since his three classics Getting Even, Without Feathers, and Side Effects, Allen has managed to write a book that answers the most profound questions of human existence.

The untimely death of Chairman Mao has set in motion enormous changes in the world. The new empress of China is a contact of Rick’s, and this leads to his involvement in events in China, the Vietnams, and Hong Kong. At the same time, he starts his quest for being the second amateur to complete a Grand Slam in golf. He learns that a broken heart hurts. As the old Chinese curse says, “May you live in interesting times.”

The characters in this extraordinary book are often - on the surface - depraved, vicious, cowardly and manipulative, but their essential humanity is never undermined. Two professors of philosophy turn pugilists; Leith removal men become the objects of desire for Hollywood goddesses; God turns Boab Coyle into a house-fly; and in the novella, 'A Smart Cunt', the drug-addled young hero spins off on a collision course with his past.

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.

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.

What really happened in the Garden of Eden? Who was behind the serpent and the apple? What was God thinking? At last, it can be told! The unexpurgated story of what really happens in Heaven. Why God created time. The truth about his friendship with Satan. Those rumors of a drinking problem. The meaning of life. Whether sin really exists. The political power of the three angels’ unions. Hear all about it! These are the stories that the cherubim don’t want you to know! This is what really goes on Behind the Pearly Gates.

Björn is a compulsive, meticulous bureaucrat who discovers a secret room at the government office where he works—a secret room that no one else in his office will acknowledge. When Björn is in his room, what his co-workers see is him standing by the wall and staring off into space looking dazed, relaxed, and decidedly creepy. Björn’s bizarre behavior eventually leads his co-workers to try and have him fired, but Björn will turn the tables on them with help from his secret room.

There were times when Bertie Wooster, the fictional narrator of these stories, was thought of as being at least a trifle feather-brained. However, he had a valet who seemed to know everything about everything. These are among more than 300 short stories written by a man who began a short-lived career in banking after his college days. However, it didn’t take long for P. G. Wodehouse to decide he didn’t like that kind of job, and he began writing in whatever spare time he had.

A novelette about an unlikely superhero.

For all those craving more adventures of their favorite bookseller-by-day and burglar-by-night, The Burglar in Short Order for the first time ever collects all of Bernie Rhodenbarr's short-form appearances in one complete volume. From the story in which a prototype of Bernie first appeared (“A Bad Night for Burglars”) to his appearances in Playboy and (maybe? It's kinda complicated) Cosmopolitan...from an essay discussing Bernie's misadventures in Hollywood to a piece commissioned by a European publisher for a tourist guide to New York....

Boston-born first-responder Alex Flynn is back with wry wit and still chasing emergencies in rural Vermont in this tale involving a gas line, a chainsaw, and other things that might or might not go boom and that might or might not go horrible wrong. Eavesdrop on emergency personnel as they attempt to diffuse a dicey situation in this, the first in the Trowbridge Dispatch collection of short stories.

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.

i>39 Years of Short-Term Memory Loss is a seriously funny, offbeat, and irreverent memoir that chronicles the early days of Saturday Night Live and features some of its greatest personalities---Al Franken, Lorne Michaels, Dan Aykroyd, John Belushi, Bill Murray, Michael O'Donoghue, and Chris Farley.