Short Stories Humor

Cassandra may have seen the future, but it doesn't mean she's resigned to telling the Trojans everything she knows. In this ebullient collection, virgins escape from being sacrificed, witches refuse to be burned, whores aren't ashamed, and every woman gets a chance to be a radioactive cockroach warrior who snaps back at catcallers.

One of Canada's most cherished writers, British-born Stephen Leacock was probably best known and loved for his works of light humor. First published in 1912, Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town is one of his most popular and enduring pieces of fiction. This collection of short stories describes the people that comprise a typical but fictional small town in Ontario - Mariposa. The book's appeal lies in the universality of the characters Leacock describes so eloquently, they live out their 'large' lives in the little town.

For centuries, the woods have been a pivotal part of the wonder and danger of fairy tales, for once you enter anything can happen. Elves, druids, fairies - who knows what you will find once you dare step into the forest?

And now, New York Times best-selling author Kim Harrison ventures into these mysterious, hidden lands of magic and mystery in her first short-story collection. Into the Woods brings together an enchanting mix of brand-new, never-before-published stories and tales from Harrison's beloved, best-selling Hollows series.

From bourgeois facial-hair trends to parental sleep deprivation, Joseph O’Neill closely observes the mores of his characters, whose vacillations and second thoughts expose the mysterious pettiness, underlying violence, and, sometimes, surprising beauty of ordinary life in the early 21st century. A lonely wedding guest talks to a goose; two poets struggle over whether to participate in a “pardon Edward Snowden” verse petition; a cowardly husband lets his wife face a possible intruder in their home; a potential co-op renter in NYC can’t find anyone to give him a character reference.

A stunning new talent in literary fiction, Nafissa Thompson-Spires grapples with black identity and the contemporary middle class in these compelling, boundary-pushing vignettes. Each captivating story plunges headfirst into the lives of new, utterly original characters. Some are darkly humorous while others are devastatingly poignant. Thompson-Spires fearlessly shines a light on the simmering tensions and precariousness of black citizenship.

With her husband stranded in a war-torn country halfway around the world, a university professor – on whom the burden of managing their small family has suddenly fallen – tries to maintain order at home. Her young daughter seems not to mind, or even really notice, the father’s absence. But as the weeks go on, mounting pressure on the narrator to balance family and work begins to take a toll.

When Sam’s wife first tells him about Vitek, a twenty-first-century fertility lab, he sees it as the natural next step in trying to help their future child get a “leg up” in a competitive world. But the more Sam considers the lives that his child could lead, the more he begins to question his own relationships and the choices he has made in his life.

The beloved author of Early Morning Riser (“The funniest novel of the year.”—The Washington Post) brings us twelve glittering stories of love—friendships formed at the airport bar, ex-husbands with benefits, mothers of suspiciously sweet teenagers, ill-advised trysts—in all its forms, both ridiculous and sublime.

In his debut collection of short stories, Robert Sheehan disappears into characters, challenging the complacencies of everyday experience, often from entirely unexpected angles. Informed by the author’s peripatetic life, Disappearing Act reflects on the absurdity of human behaviour. Sheehan delves deep into his characters’ streams of self-talk and self-imposed delusions, exploring the dark impulses that lurk below the shiny surfaces of many outwardly normal lives.

Children Playing Before a Statue of Hercules is a collection of short stories, some classic, others impending, selected and introduced by David Sedaris.

The time is the early '80s. The characters go to the same schools and eat at the same restaurants. Their voices enfold us as seamlessly as those of DJs heard over a car radio. They have sex with the same boys and girls and buy from the same dealers. In short, they are connected in the only way people can be in that city.

Kevin Wilson’s characters inhabit a world that moves seamlessly between the real and the imagined, the mundane and the fantastic. “Grand Stand-In” is narrated by an employee of the Nuclear Family Supplemental Provider—a company that supplies “stand-ins” for families with deceased, ill, or plain mean grandparents. And in “Blowing Up On the Spot,” a young woman works sorting tiles at a Scrabble factory after her parents have spontaneously combusted. These wonderfully inventive stories explore the relationship between loss and death and the ways we try to cope with both.

From the number one New York Times best-selling author of the Man Booker Prize-winning novel Lincoln in the Bardo and the story collection Tenth of December, a 2013 National Book Award Finalist for Fiction. Talking candy bars, baby geniuses, disappointed mothers, castrated dogs, interned teenagers, and moral fables - all in this hilarious and heartbreaking collection from an author hailed as the heir to Kurt Vonnegut and Thomas Pynchon.

It's 2017, and a raging virus has drastically reduced the world's population of men, transforming all but a fraction into a race of putrid, brain-dead zombies. So what's single, ambitious 23-year-old Hattie Cross to do for fun, not to mention romance? In this hilarious marriage of post-apocalyptic fiction and super smart chick-lit with a wry twist, novelist Lynn Messina spoofs dating manuals, monsters, and the superficial media world, all the while creating a feisty, funny heroine with heart.

Es una sucesión perturbadora en la que la conciencia adquiere una dimensión real y los impulsos más secretos se presentan con toda su altanera desnudez: el amor conyugal, el amor por las letras, el amore de las madres, el platónico, el primer amor, el amor en la posmodernidad, el amor por el trabajo, y otros amores y desamores, inconfesables, condenados, acomodaticios que, unos más que otros, nos matan.

These 11 stories by Joshua Ferris, many of which were first published in The New Yorker, are at once thrilling, strange, and comic. The modern tribulations of marriage, ambition, and the fear of missing out as the temptations flow like wine and the minutes of life tick down are explored with the characteristic wit and insight that have made Ferris one of our most critically acclaimed novelists.

Three short stories by Anton Chekhov including "The First-Class Passenger", "The Harmfulness of Tobacco", and "A Transgression".

A vast caravan of RVs roams the United States. A girl grows a unicorn horn, complicating her small-town friendships and big city ambitions. A young lady on a spaceship bonds with her AI warden while trying to avoid an arranged marriage. In Allegra Hyde’s universe nothing is as it seems, yet the challenges encountered in these pages mirror those we face in our modern age.

"If there’s a lesson to be learned, it’s that logic is the sworn enemy of grief," writes Halimah Marcus, co-editor of Electric Literature, in her introduction to “Firewood," a hilarious and devastating story by J. Robert Lennon. "When the narrator’s wife (expectedly) leaves him, too devastated to admit the obvious, he concocts an impossible explanation for her disappearance. All I’ll say is that it involves the woodpile. The invented story is more horrible than the truth, but somehow easier to manage."

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.