Literary Humor

In this collection of stories you'll meet a bunch of memorable guys including Lonesome Shorty, a cowpoke torn between the proud life in the saddle and the comforts of warm apartments and women; Buddy, the teen-age leper in Sioux Falls; Earl Grey, the great tea inventor and former Republican child; Casey, at the bat in Mudville again; Dionysus, the god of wine; and Roy Bradley, boy broadcaster.

In her own words, Stella Sweeney is just "an ordinary woman living an ordinary life with her husband and two teenage kids", working for her sister in their neighborhood beauty salon. Then one day she is struck by a serious illness that lands her in the hospital for months.

Maxine Tarnow is running a nice little fraud investigation business on the Upper West Side, chasing down different kinds of small-scale con artists. She used to be legally certified but her license got pulled a while back, which has actually turned out to be a blessing because now she can follow her own code of ethics - carry a Beretta, do business with sleazebags, hack into people's bank accounts - without having too much guilt about any of it. Otherwise, just your average working mom - two boys in elementary school, an off-and-on situation with her sort of semi-ex-husband Horst - till Maxine starts looking into the finances of a computer-security firm....

I've known Death a long time but now Death knows me. When their idyllic childhood is shattered by the sudden death of their parents, siblings Marty, Liz and Jules are sent to a bleak state boarding school. Once there, the orphans' lives change tracks: Marty throws himself into academic life; Liz is drawn to dark forms of escapism; and Jules transforms from a vivacious child to a withdrawn teenager.

Millie, 30, just can't pull it together. Misanthropic and morose, she spends her days killing time at a thankless temp job until she can return home to her empty apartment, where she oscillates between self-recrimination and mild delusion, fixating on all the little ways she might change her life. Then she watches TV until she drops off to sleep, and the cycle begins again. When the possibility of a full-time job offer arises, it seems to bring the better life she's envisioning within reach. But with it also comes the paralyzing realization of just how hollow that vision has become.

From the rubble-strewn streets of US-occupied Baghdad, Hadi - a scavenger and an oddball fixture at a local café - collects human body parts and stitches them together to create a corpse. His goal, he claims, is for the government to recognize the parts as people and to give them proper burial. But when the corpse goes missing, a wave of eerie murders sweeps the city, and reports stream in of a horrendous-looking criminal who, though shot, cannot be killed.

Brilliant designer Miko Jin has spent most of her life falling in love over and over again...with the men she finds in the pages of her favorite novels. When Miko meets Liam Ashton, it’s love at first sight. At least, for her. Sure, the two of them are polar opposites, and yes, he seems to be dating someone new each week.

Victor Mancini, a medical school dropout, is an antihero for our deranged times. Needing to pay elder care for his mother, Victor has devised an ingenious scam: He pretends to choke on pieces of food while dining in upscale restaurants. He then allows himself to be “saved” by fellow patrons who, feeling responsible for Victor’s life, go on to send checks to support him.

Take a wonderfully crazed excursion into the demented heart of a tropical paradise - a world of cargo cults, cannibals, mad scientists, ninjas, and talking fruit bats. Our bumbling hero is Tucker Case, a hopeless geek trapped in a cool guy's body, who makes a living as a pilot for the Mary Jean Cosmetics Corporation.

American Howard W. Campbell, Jr., a spy during World War II, is now on trial in Israel as a Nazi war criminal. But is he really guilty? In this brilliant book rife with true gallows humor, Kurt Vonnegut turns black and white into a chilling shade of grey with a verdict that will haunt us all. Mother Night is a daring challenge to our moral sense.

The quiet 1960s midwestern life of the Land family is upended when son Davy kills two marauders who have come to harm the family. The morning of his sentencing, Davy (a hero to some, a cold-blooded murderer to others) escapes from his cell, and the Lands set out in search of him. Their journey is touched by serendipity and the kindness of strangers, and they cover territory even more extraordinary than the Badlands, where they search for Davy from their Airstream trailer.

Where did Roald Dahl get all of his wonderful ideas for stories? From his own life, of course! As full of excitement and the unexpected as his world-famous, best-selling books, Roald Dahl's tales of his own childhood are completely fascinating and fiendishly funny. Did you know that Roald Dahl nearly lost his nose in a car accident? Or that he was once a chocolate candy tester for Cadbury's? Have you heard about his involvement in the Great Mouse Plot of 1924? If not, you don’t yet know all there is to know about Roald Dahl.

Once an inventive puppeteer, Sabbath at sixty-four is still defiantly antagonistic and exceedingly libidinous. But after the death of his longtime mistress—an erotic free spirit whose adulterous daring surpassed even his own—Sabbath, bereft and grieving and besieged by the ghosts of those who loved and hated him most, contrives a succession of farcical disasters that take him to the brink of madness and extinction.

In this slyly funny and lavishly inventive novel, Nobel Prize winner V. S. Naipaul traces the unlikely career of Ganesh Ramsumair, a failed schoolteacher and impecunious village masseur who in time becomes a revered mystic, a thriving entrepreneur, and the most beloved politician in Trinidad. Witty, tender, filled with the sights, sounds, and smells of Trinidad's dusty Indian villages, The Mystic Masseur is Naipaul at his most expansive and evocative.

Daniel Pecan Cambridge, 30, 35, 38 or 27, depending on how he feels that day, is a young man whose life is rich and full, provided he never leaves his Santa Monica apartment. After all, outside there are 8-inch-high curbs and there's always the horrible chance he might see a gas station attendant wearing a blue hat. So, except for the occasional trip to the Rite Aid to admire the California girl Zandy and to buy earplugs because they're on sale, he stays home a lot. And good thing, too.

From the creator of the beloved and universally acclaimed television series BoJack Horseman, a fabulously off-beat collection of short stories about love - the best and worst thing in the universe. Equally at home with the surreal and the painfully relatable (and both at once), Bob-Waksberg delivers a killer combination of humor, romance, whimsy, cultural commentary, and crushing emotional vulnerability.

Things on board the R.M.S. Atlantic are terribly, terribly complicated... Monty Bodkin loves Gertrude, who thinks he likes Lotus Blossom, a starlet, who definitely adores Ambrose, who thinks that she has a thing for his brother, Reggie, who is struck by Mabel Spence, sister-in-law of Ikey Llewellyn (movie mogul, Ambrose's prospective employer and reluctant smuggler), but hasn't the means to marry her.

Once a hotshot investigative reporter, Jack Tagger now bangs out obituaries for a South Florida daily, "plotting to resurrect my newspaper career by yoking my byline to some famous stiff". Jimmy Stoma, the infamous front man of Jimmy and the Slut Puppies, dead in a fishy-smelling scuba "accident", might be the stiff of Jack’s dreams - if only he can figure out what happened.

Frances Price - tart widow, possessive mother, and Upper East Side force of nature - is in dire straits, beset by scandal and impending bankruptcy. Her adult son Malcolm is no help, mired in a permanent state of arrested development. And then there’s the Price’s aging cat, Small Frank, who Frances believes houses the spirit of her late husband, an infamously immoral litigator and world-class cad whose gruesome tabloid death rendered Frances and Malcolm social outcasts. Putting penury and pariahdom behind them, the family decides to cut their losses and head for the exit.

A delightfully funny and moving novel about the singular life of a cantankerous Jewish-American writer and anarchist troublemaker, as remembered by his daughter. In 1972, sixty-four-year-old Ezra Slavin's heart gives out at an anti-war rally. A contentious and irascible Jewish-American writer, anarchist, and inadvertent guru to discontented youth, he leaves behind a large extended family of ex-wives, lovers, and children, most of whom had cut all ties with the infuriating intellectual provocateur years earlier.