Storytelling Fiction

Remember the stories your grandfather used to tell you about way back when? Remember laughing out loud as the stories got deeper? If you like to LOL, then this really is a book for you. Here you'll find some observations on life in general and people in particular, as seen through a collection of newspaper columns, presenting skewed, offbeat, semiserious, and sometimes amusing views of the world.

Prize-winning author Benjamin Hale's fiction abounds with a love of language and a wild joy for storytelling. In prose alternately stark, lush and hallucinatory, occasionally nightmarish and often absurd, the seven stories in this collection are suffused with fear and desire, introducing us to a company of indelible characters reeling with love, jealousy, megalomania, and despair.

What About the Baby?: Some Thoughts on the Art of Fiction gathers the best-selling novelist Alice McDermott’s pithiest wisdom about her chosen art, acquired over a lifetime as an acclaimed writer and teacher of writing.

A comedy of errors when four octogenarian Egyptology docents steal a mummy which has no value to find artifacts they know do not exist and are mistaken for a band of professional art thieves.

In all my years of reporting on the human condition, this has to be the most bizarre, and (if true) history shattering interviews I've ever conducted. This story is told by Billy "Big Rig", a pseudonymous truck driver I met over sausage gravy and biscuits in the late 1990s when I was driving a truck to make ends meet. We struck up a friendship, although I think I maybe spoke 10 words to him the whole time I knew him. He did most of the talking. And the way he spun a yarn caused me to be transfixed.

From Scandihoovian Spanglish to snickering chickens, New York Times best-selling author and humorist Michael Perry navigates a wide range of topics in this collection of brief essays drawn from his weekly appearances on the nationally syndicated Tent Show Radio program. Fatherhood, dumpster therapy, dangerous wedding rings, Christmas trees, used cars, why you should have bacon in your stock portfolio, loggers in clogs - whatever the subject, Perry has a rare ability to touch both the funny bone and the heart.

There are 83 copies of the First Folio in a vault beneath Capitol Hill - the world's largest collection. Well over 150 Indian movies are based on Shakespeare's plays - more than in any other nation. If current trends continue, there will soon be more high school students reading The Merchant of Venice in Mandarin Chinese than in early modern English. Why did this happen, and how? Ranging ambitiously across four continents and 400 years, Worlds Elsewhere is an eye-opening account of how Shakespeare went global.

一段一江湖，一圈一世界！唯名山能留仙住，是真传只说家常。红尘万丈，光怪陆离，一本歪经。 ……一段一江湖，一圈一世界！唯名山能留仙住，是真傳只說家常。紅塵萬丈，光怪陸離，一本歪經。

This bundle includes The Gymnastics Mystery, The Poison Frog Mystery, and The Mystery of the Empty Safe.

Comedy of Doom is a collection of essays, parodies, and true stories covering every major topic in geek culture. Including smart, funny takes on video games, Star Wars, vampires, Doctor Who, Jane Austen, a complete guide to emotional preparation for the zombie apocalypse, instructions for the new sport called Competitive Hugging, and more.

Seeking to embarrass and humiliate an obnoxious editor, four college students create an amazingly profane alter ego to submit poetry to the student literary magazine. Hilarity ensues...until the Rude Poet continues to submit new works after the four have retired their alter ego. Then when things get personal and threatening, more than just some bruised egos may be on the line.

This sophomoric sophomore collection of doggerel by low self-esteemed quasi-celebrity cross-dressing debutant DJ Ass Maggots is guaranteed fun for the whole family, assuming that family consists of perverts, junkies, and hardened ex-cons.

Like a Jay Ward cartoon in audio, The Adventures of Tea Man, Volume Two is a hilarious, wacky collection of radio theater written and performed by Mitchell Pearson and the DQD Theater of Philadelphia and produced by Joe Bevilacqua. Get ready for two hours of comedy entertainment!

Doty Meets Coyote is an audio tapestry of traditional and original Native American stories from the American West told by master storyteller Thomas Doty. It is Thomas Doty's work as a storyteller not only to perpetuate the Old Time myths with integrity but to add new stories to the collective basket of folklore, just as tellers before him have done for centuries. Storytelling is an ancient tradition as well as a living art.

The 85% Man and Lessons from Lucille is Bob Mack Peak's well-crafted, uplifting, heart-felt, and romantic self-help epic. It's a lighthearted look at the differences between men and women. Peak strives to prove the well-known, open proposition that "Everything my mother told me about women is true... and I can prove it." The book's flowing narrative offers the reader a delightful journey toward discovering life's truest reward-unconditional love.

Several years had passed since Hotdog Man had perished by the hands of General Gouda, the world went back to an era of peace and tranquility. During this time, Hotdog Man was in another dimension, a world of the spirits, where he was in a war with the demonic Dr. Mustard and his army of ghost soldiers. Meanwhile, in the land of the living, Hotdog Jr., had grown up into a mild manner teenager. The Eyno Gems had been destroyed, leaving our heroes unable to access their incredible powers.

Maya knew that this was going to be her last homecoming for a while, but she didn't know or expect that this homecoming would be the craziest and/or chaotic one of all. Although Maya has always been the peacemaker in the group, this may be the first time she may just let it go. Through it all, she and her friends will realize how crazy things can get this homecoming may even challenge or destroy their friendship.

Jake saw something unspeakable when he was nine. An act of violence. Brutal. He doesn't know it, but this trauma will play a key role in shaping him later in life. Now, he's 15. A wimp. He flinches. Always. He seeks the guidance of the biggest bad-ass he knows, his cousin Nick. Nick is a professional burglar and makes Jake his apprentice. Nick teaches Jake his dark philosophy - that there is no right or wrong in the world, just a series of events that happen without meaning. At first this helps Jake, but it also unleashes an aggression in himself he never thought possible....

Goin' Postal tells the story of a real U.S. postal worker dealing with crazy situations that the public never sees. From human heads in the mail to alligators on the loose in the building, this book is sure to make you laugh. The second book in this combo, The Creek, tells stories set in the same location, but each story is set in a different time period. The last story depicts how the people and stories of the past are still alive today.

Nella Larsen’s 1929 novel Passing is hailed today as a significant literary work of Harlem Renaissance, though for several decades it, like all of her works, was out of print. As history rights a wrong and recommits Larsen’s name to memory, it is beneficial to look at the other writings she published over her short career, collected here in Beyond Passing: The Further Writings of Nella Larsen.