Short Stories Humor

"Isn't so and so a snob?" he asks. "She won't even admit she liked Grease." Looking for an author who ponders the imponderable, expresses the inexpressible, describes the indescribable, and leaves no burning issue of American popular culture or world concern unexamined? Well, you'll find him in Mark Leyner. On this recording, Leyner, one of the most gifted and original young American writers around, reads 6 prose pieces from his first published book.

"Stranger's Thing" by Robert Bevan: Four friends get more than they bargained for when they break into a seemingly abandoned research lab. "The Shingling" by Steve Wetherell: Johnny Terry, a recovering meth addict, is excited to start his new life as the caretaker at the Underpass Motel. Unfortunately, the Underpass is haunted by the ghosts of dead porn stars. "The Haunting of Whore House" by Robert Bevan: Lucy and her brother, Junkie, find out that moving was only the beginning of their troubles when they encounter the ghost of a little boy in the woods. Plus three more!

Erin Craig "delivers" on a story about a new girl in town and the cute pizza delivery boy, Auriane Desombre captures our hearts with teens communicating through window signs, and Bill Konigsberg takes us along on daily walks with every step bringing us closer to love. There's flirting and romance from Rachael Lippincott, a tale of a determined girl with a mask-making business from Erin Hahn, and a music-inspired love connection from Sajni Patel. Brittney Morris turns enemies to lovers with the help of a balcony herb garden.

Actor Matthew McConaughey descends into a surreal desert of the soul, an admirer of Miley Cyrus performs a 3,000-word sentence in defense of his passion, an aging porn star dons a dinosaur costume to film the sex scene of a lifetime, and Leonard Cohen shills for Subway: these mercurial and wildly varied stories explode the conventions of short fiction.

Dinner is served - with a little something on the side. A Brooklyn wife is too sharp to allow her husband’s wandering eye to get the best of her in this witty short story of a dinner party with a delicious comeuppance. Eleanor and Jonathan have joined a few of their most irritating best friends for an intimate catered gathering. Through all the intellectual chatter, Eleanor’s on watch. Jonathan has already confessed to wanting an open marriage, and tonight, Eleanor has decided to accommodate him. Just not quite the way he expects.

No one knew that Betty wore corrective lenses until she showed up for Sunday coffee wearing a very thick pair of warped-lensed dark brown plastic-framed glasses. She’d contracted an eye infection resulting in one of her eyes becoming a beady little eye. At coffe, her cousin, Roger, accidentally spilled the beans regarding him dating someone named Pat. Unable to squash their curiosity, wanting to learn more about this mysterious Pat person, Aggie and Betty followed Roger to a day spa in Palm Springs. That was when Aggie received a dreaded phone call from her archnemesis.

Join George Sibley and Norman Kettlewell in this lightning-fast, quick listen as they pit their combined wits against the scourge of the allotment community - the dreaded mole. Set a few years before the events of Peas, Carrots and an Aston Martin, this stand-alone novella brings back many of your favorite characters, along with a couple of new faces. The Mole Fiasco has all of Hannah Lynn's trademark wit and humor wrapped up in a bite-sized packet.

It’s Halloween night, and Aggie, Betty, and Roger are invited to a haunted house by a handsome vampire. Little did they know that they were about to encounter something incredibly spooky.

Some people have to be force-fed maturity - particularly teenagers stranded helplessly on remote Canadian Islands. Join Patrick Marks, a towering icon of wimp-i-tude, in this hilarious short tale about maturing experiences with bears, mosquitoes the size of large poodles, Pot-Licker the cat, and near-death experiences with outhouses.

Flying into action, daredevil photojournalist Johnny Brice is always looking for trouble...and more often than not, finding it. But he doesn’t know what real trouble is until he rescues the beautiful woman he calls Jinx from a sinking ship. They’re made for each other - even if they are a dangerous mix.

Two wealthy gentlemen decide to give a poor stranger a million-pound bank note to see what he will do with it. The results are very unexpected.

For former pushover Janet, her Sophie curls appear to be a balanced and beautiful new addition to her magical, life-changing wig collection. She’s positively beaming, has smoothed out the wrinkles in her personal life, and is embarking on a philanthropic new business venture. Everything is ideal until the unthinkable happens and she has to stand on her own - with a final push from Lady Miss Jacqueline, of course!

A paintball battleground. A wrestling mat for sleep-deprived new daddies. A feminine product aisle in the local drugstore. These are some of the places where men connect...at least in The Bromantic Comedies. A compilation of humorous and heartfelt plays exploring what it means to be "masculine" in a world where men are supposed to be tough.

One obnoxious English teacher. Twelve tales of his death. Norton Edwards, English department head, is the reigning despot in Canterbury High. This year, his colleagues have had enough. This year, they're getting rid of Mr. Edwards. In this collection of darkly tongue-in-cheek stories, Mr. Edwards dies, tale after tale.

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.

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.

En este libro, una decena y media de autores utiliza como recurso la cara más negra del humor mexicano para relatar anécdotas, digamos, un poco extremas: hay suicidas que se encuentran, fantasmas que deben morir, payasos combustibles, burócratas perdedores, niñas buenas que deben cometer un solo acto de relativa maldad… Pero el oyente no debe temer, esos extremos solo van de lo desopilante a lo macabro. Un libro que quizá te mate de risa.

국내 유수 전자제품 회사에는 'SF팀'이 있다는 걸 알고 계십니까? 그냥 아무 SF나 읽다가 괜찮은 발상이 있으면 상부에 보고서를 쓰기만 하면 되는 꿀보직이죠. 그런데 세상에 아무 이유 없는 혜택이란 없는 법입니다….

Con una prosa ágil, desinhibida y acertada, Rafael Medina nos entrega estos relatos en los que se vale del humor negro para poner ante nosotros, con tonos de retrato más que de denuncia, historias que fácilmente podrían estar sucediendo en este momento a unas cuantas cuadras de nosotros, pero vistos bajo la mirada del "arte de su tiempo" que Medina utiliza con sutiles atisbos de crítica.

When Harold Ross founded The New Yorker in 1925, he described it as a “comic weekly.” And although it has become much more than that, it has remained true in its irreverent heart to the founder’s description, publishing the most illustrious literary humorists of the modern era. This anthology gathers together, for the first time, the funniest work of more than seventy New Yorker contributors.