Short Stories Humor

What happens when Joey and his sister, Mary Alice - two city slickers from Chicago - make their annual summer visits to Grandma Dowdel's seemingly sleepy Illinois town? Joey and Mary Alice make seven summer trips to Grandma's, each one funnier and more surprising than the year before.

Fox 8 has always been known as the daydreamer in his pack, the one his fellow foxes regarded with a knowing snort and a roll of the eyes. That is, until Fox 8 develops a unique skill: He teaches himself to speak Yuman by hiding in the bushes outside a house and listening to children’s bedtime stories. The power of language fuels his abundant curiosity about people - even after danjer arrives in the form of a new shopping mall that cuts off his food supply, sending Fox 8 on a harrowing quest to help save his pack.

Welcome to the Monkey House is a collection of Kurt Vonnegut's shorter works. Originally printed in publications as diverse as The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction and The Atlantic Monthly, what these superb stories share is Vonnegut's audacious sense of humor and extraordinary range of creative vision.

In "Center of the Universe", God struggles to balance the demands of his career with the needs of his long-term girlfriend. In "Magical Mr. Goat", a young girl's imaginary friend yearns to become more than friends. In "Unprotected", an unused prophylactic recalls his years spent trapped inside a teen boy's wallet. The stories in Simon Rich's new audiobook are bizarre, funny, and yet...relatable. Rich explores love's many complications--losing it, finding it, breaking it, and making it--and turns the ordinary into the absurd.

Small Bones in a Fist is composed of stories drawn from Blindboy's first two published books: The Gospel According to Blindboy and Boulevard Wren and Other Stories. Curated, narrated and scored by the author, Small Bones in a Fist is a surreal, provocative and darkly funny introduction to one of the most original voices in Irish literature.

Since its publication in 1996, George Saunders’ debut collection has grown in esteem from a cherished cult classic to a masterpiece of the form, inspiring an entire generation of writers along the way. In six stories and a novella, Saunders hatches an unforgettable cast of characters, each struggling to survive in an increasingly haywire world.

Meet the women of American Housewife: They wear lipstick, pearls, and sunscreen, even when it's cloudy. They casserole. They pinwheel. They pump the salad spinner like it's a CPR dummy. And then they kill a party crasher, carefully stepping around the body to pull cookies out of the oven. These 12 irresistible stories take us from a haunted prewar Manhattan apartment building to the set of a rigged reality television show, from the unique initiation ritual of a book club to the getaway car of a pageant princess on the lam.

Award-winning storyteller Barbara McBride-Smith breathes life (albeit a wizened Texan version) into the old Greek myths. With her incurable Texas drawl, she spins the Greek myths as you've never heard them before, rendering them 99% more fun while retaining 100% of their original insights into the crooked ways of the human heart and the no less crooked ways of the ancient Greek gods.

A piercingly raw debut story collection from a young writer with an explosive voice; a treacherously surreal and, at times, heartbreakingly satirical look at what it's like to be young and black in America.

Eighteen of the very best American short stories, each a classic in its own right. Stories include "The Little Frenchman and his Water Lots", by George Pope Morris; "The Angel of the Odd", by Edgar Allan Poe; "The Schoolmasters’s Progress", by Caroline M.S. Kirkland; "The Watkinson Evening", by Eliza Leslie; "Titbottom’s Spectacles", by George William Curtis; "My Double and "How He Undid Me", by Edward Everett Hale; "A Visit to the Asylum for Aged and Decayed Punsters", by Oliver Wendell; and more.

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.

Here you have found a book so foul, so repulsive, so horrifying...that you will undoubtedly find yourself running to the nearest bathroom in an effort to both relieve your bowels and scrub your hands clean of its putrid filth. They have finally released this humorous collection of terrifying tales, despite the bitter public outcry which demanded these pages never see the light of day...and perhaps for good reason.

Demonstrating once again why he is one of Canada's most loved jokesters, Black masterfully captures the laughter that often bursts out of the seams of everyday life. From an unexpected drag race to a Google search for a picture of the illusive "Arthur the Meek", you just never know when a regular day is going to turn into comedic genius. Black provides uproarious insight into uses a matador might have for a teacup, mango, or simply some paper towel....

This is a collection of the second six short stories in the Caverns and Creatures series.

Now, available in audio for the first time, Side Effects is narrated by Woody Allen himself. A humor classic by one of the world’s funniest writers, Side Effects is a treat for Allen fans and those just discovering how gifted he is. In classics including "Remembering Needleman", "The Kugelmass Episode", "Confessions of a Burglar", and others, Allen discusses such subjects as the nature of relativity, the UFO menace, and the predicament of modern man.

Taking its title from a group of stories that begin the book, Bream Gives Me Hiccups moves from contemporary LA to the dorm rooms of an American college to ancient Pompeii, throwing the listener into a universe of social misfits, reimagined scenes from history, and ridiculous overreactions. In one piece a tense email exchange between a young man and his girlfriend is taken over by the man's sister, who is obsessed with the Bosnian genocide ("The situation reminds me of a little historical blip called the Karadordevo agreement").

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.

After a failed petition to change his career, Bill, the local pottery maker and town drunk, is coerced by his neighbors and king to join an expedition to hunt down and slay a mighty dragon that plagues their village.

In this darkly comic and surreal collection from celebrated author Alissa Nutting, misfit women scramble for agency in a series of uncanny circumstances. Throughout these breathtakingly creative 17 stories spread across time, space, and differing planes of reality, we encounter a host of women and girls in a wide range of unusual jobs. A space cargo deliverywoman enlists the help of her cybersex partner to release her mother from cryogenic prison.

Just when things have finally cooled down for 88-year-old Maud after the disturbing discovery of a dead body in her apartment in Gothenburg, a couple of detectives return to her doorstep. Though Maud dodges their questions with the skill of an Olympic gymnast a fifth of her age, she wonders if suspicion has fallen on her, little old lady that she is. The truth is, ever since Maud was a girl, death has seemed to follow her....