Humor Anthology

Welcome to the world of Droll Tales, in which reality is a mutually agreed-upon illusion and life is painful, paradoxical, beautiful, and brief. With an oddball cast of characters who reappear in various guises throughout these interrelated stories, Smyles reveals an off-kilter world overlapping this one. And in giving us a tour of this enchanted, sometimes absurd place, with its own workings and ways of expression, she gives us a new way to understand our own.

Centering us in Rome, but transporting us seamlessly into worlds as varied and exotic as they are emotionally real, these stories paint landscapes that are populated - vividly, hauntingly - by animals: from squawking, violent seagulls, to magical snakes, to a tiny dog on the side of a deserted road, to starlings circling the evening sky in exhilarating formation.

Okano, a convenience store employee with a troubled past, is but one of the many unforgettable characters found in this collection of four stories. Among the others are three boys facing a frightening lesson in mortality, a woman using garbage to fill a hole in her heart, and a nurse struggling to cope with the oft-brutal cycle of birth, life, and death. Remaining constant even as it fades in and out of view is the great Mount Fuji, one of Japan’s Three Holy Mountains. It serves as the anchor for these characters’ lives, and for Randy Taguchi’s Fujisan, an exploration of redemption, discovery, loss, and remembrance.

Deadly Reunion is a collection of short stories. The first story, Deadly Reunion, tells of five women who reunite at a school reunion. A few months later they are invited to one of the women's lakeside cabins for a girl's weekend. Unfortunately for them they have been lured into a trap, this reunion does not go well. Who's you Daddy is the story of two young children whose mother dies leaving them orphaned. Having never known who their father was or if he was even still alive, they run off in the hopes of finding some relatives to live with rather than being split up and placed in separate ...

Heidi is writing a script to explain the financial industry, based on how the men within it approach romance. Her clueless heroine is looking for a Wall Street husband, but who’s the best option? The trader? The investment banker? The venture capitalist? Scene by sizzling scene, Heidi considers their assets. What she wants for certain is a happy ending - but when she hits a dead end, it might take a real-life finance guy to show her what a long-term investment really looks like.

Framed as a reference work of humorous “entries” that offer trenchant social commentary, Everything Abridged presages a dark vision of the near future but tells jokes in the face of it: An intelligence agency operative uncovers a conspiracy to generate conspiracies and realizes his participation in the scheme. A Caribbean monarch meets four decades of American presidents and adjusts his country’s foreign policy accordingly. Experiment participants are asked to bring back a gun as quickly as possible.

Step back in time with H.D. Ingles, in The Forties & The Fifties A Collection of Stories. Born in 1939, Ingles brings these decades to life through heartfelt narratives and humorous stories about growing up in a large family during the golden era of American growth. You’ll witness H.D.’s vivid recollections of the excitement surrounding emerging technologies, like the transistor radio and early television. And you’ll gain a deeper appreciation for the sacrifices and hard work that laid the groundwork for the post-war boom years, all beautifully capture by Mr. Ingles' pen. The Forties ...

It began with a letter from my uncle. Now I'm lost in a world of magic and monsters, and running from an evil witch trying to make me into stew...if my new and unusual friends don't kill me first. Worst of all, there's no pizza!

Welcome to another kind of terror as Peter Straub leads us into the outer reaches of the psyche. Here the master of the macabre is at his absolute best in seven exquisite tales of living, dying, and the terror that lies in between.

This delightful collection of short stories from acclaimed writer Susan Gabriel (The Secret Sense of Wildflower, a Kirkus Reviews Best Book of 2012 and an Amazon number one best seller) is rich in humor as well as mystery and meaning. Whether white or black, living or dead, down home country or upscale urban, Gabriel's characters are quirky, poignant, and deep.

¿Puede un hombre destejerse? ¿Cómo vive una familia invisible? ¿Aprenden los cangrejos a tomar sopa con cuchara? ¿Los centauros duermen en camas o en establos? Y una pregunta más: ¿una abuela puede usar chupete? Como ves, las historias de este libro son asombrosas, increíbles y desopilantes (o simplemente imposibles). Diez cuentos cortos, originales y repletos de humor. Un libro ideal para tentar a los lectores de entre 7 y 10 años a entrar en el maravilloso mundo de la lectura. Con el ingenio y el humor absurdo que caracteriza la obra de Ema Wolf.

"The Eyes Have It" is a humorous, early short story by Philip K. Dick that first appeared in Science Fiction Stories in 1953. In it, a bus-riding reader of a discarded melodrama with an overactive imagination is persuaded by the hackneyed prose that the world has been taken over by aliens. Thus, when "eyes slowly roved around the room", the reader imagines disembodied eyeballs traveling of their own free will. A rare example of satire from the Dick canon.

It's junior year and Rachael is psyched to ditch dorm life and share a house with four other girls. But, she can't shake the ominous feeling about her narcissistic roommate-landlady, who has a history of derailing her love life. And then there are those uninvited visits by the ex-boyfriend of another roommate, who brings brushes with the law and heaps of drama as his calling card. When Rachael's mother and her psychic groupies show up in their double-decker bus during a house party, Mom reveals a troubling premonition.

"Suppose que tu rencontres un fou qui affirme qu'il est un poisson et que nous sommes tous des poissons. Vas-tu te disputer avec lui ? Vas-tu te déshabiller devant lui pour lui montrer que tu n'as pas de nageoires ? Vas-tu lui dire en face ce que tu penses ?" Son frère se taisait, et Édouard poursuivit : "Si tu ne lui disais que la vérité, que ce que tu penses vraiment de lui, ça voudrait dire que tu consens à avoir une discussion sérieuse avec un fou et que tu es toi-même fou.

The coat. It was elegant. It was beautiful. It was so close that he could have reached out and touched it. And it was unquestionably his. A Neverwhere short story from one of the brightest, most brilliant writers of our generation - the Sunday Times and New York Times best-selling author of the award-winning The Ocean at the End of the Lane.

From Roald Dahl, the master of the sting in the tail, a newly collected audiobook of his darkest stories, read by Juliet Stevenson, Cillian Murphy, Adrian Scarborough, Tamsin Greig, Stephanie Beacham and Andrew Scott. 'There is a pleasure sure in being mad, which none but madmen know.' Our greatest fear is of losing control - of our lives, but, most of all, of ourselves. In these 10 unsettling tales of unexpected madness master storyteller Roald Dahl explores what happens when we let go our sanity.

Gogol's phantasmagorical tale about a man whose nose decides to abscond and begin living a life of its own is one of the earliest and most celebrated examples of absurdist literature. Apart from its recondite humor, it is remarkable for Gogol's skill in characterization and his ability to paint a picture of contemporary life in Russia in a few verbal brushstrokes.

Yes, Jack Plank started out to be a pirate. His shipmates all liked him, and their ship, the Avarice, was certainly very beautiful. But after a while it was clear that he wasn’t much good at plundering. He just didn’t have the knack for it. So what to do? Jack did the only thing he could do - he went ashore to look for another line of work. The town was called Salt-wash, on the coast of the Caribbean Sea, and he had a lot of helpful advice from the people in Mrs. DelFresno’s boardinghouse.

A lineman with something to prove. A vendetta against a baseball legend. The rise of a real-life NHL all-star. The luckiest grapefruit in sports history. Open up The Sports Pages, the third volume in the Guys Read Library of Great Reading, and you're in for all of this and more. From fiction to nonfiction, from baseball to mixed martial arts and everything in between, these are 10 stories about the rush of victory and the crush of defeat on and off the field. Compiled by kid-lit all-star Jon Scieszka, Guys Read: The Sports Pages is a thrilling collection of brand-new short stories.

HO HO HOMICIDE? When the man who plays Santa for the Maycroft Christmas Festival goes missing, the committee turns to Deena Sharpe to find him. Her reputation for solving mysteries is legendary. But when the case becomes a kidnapping, she's worried something sinister has happened. Sharpe Claus has plenty of suspects and enough finger pointing to keep Deena on her toes. Follow along as she tries to solve the case of the missing Santa! This fun, cozy Christmas novella can be read as a standalone in the Maycroft Mysteries by USA Today Bestselling Author Lisa B. Thomas. Like all the books in ...