Humor Anthology

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.

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.

The Burglars' Club is the most exclusive of exclusive Gentleman's Clubs in Victorian London. To pay their dues, members must steal something very valuable and hard to get, and present it to the club at the following meeting (They return it afterwards, of course, if possible). Full of comedy, suspense, and mystery. The award-winning Colonial Radio Theatre on the Air brings these wonderful stories to life with a full cast, music, and sound effects.

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.

Tales from the Eerie Canal weaves the sinister mystery of Edgar Allan Poe with the dark humor of Edward Gorey. No canal. No Lake Erie. Just a stream of the disturbing splashed with bits of the absurd.

"Faire rentrer toute la vie d'un homme ou d'une femme dans une goutte d'eau", telle est la définition des "Microfictions" que propose son auteur et dans lesquelles sont rassemblés des "fragments de la vie des gens". Aucun domaine de nos vies n'échappe à Régis Jauffret, explorateur infatigable du quotidien, et à son regard grinçant sur l'existence.

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.

Cutter, a hard-working woman who makes her living waiting tables and writing obits, is determined to sabotage the sale of her family's dilapidated ancestral home. Every time a potential buyer comes calling, she makes every effort to play down any possible charm that might be found within the crumbling walls.

In The Wrong Heaven, anything is possible: bodies can transform, inanimate objects come to life, angels appear and disappear. Amy Bonnaffons draws us into a delightfully strange universe, in which her conflicted characters seek to solve their sexual and spiritual dilemmas in all the wrong places. While some of the worlds to which Bonnaffons transports us are more recognizable than others, all of them uncover the mysteries beneath the mundane surfaces of our lives. As provocative as they are deeply affecting, these stories lay bare the heart of our deepest longings.

"Wesley Hunt was always considered strange." And so this quirky, offbeat short story by the witty and wonderful Canadian author and actor Robert Jadah begins. Wesley's odd behavior, however, is accompanied by unique abilities in regard to discovering hidden treasures. His kind of Easter egg hunt is not the one you'd likely expect.

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.

If you want to laugh, there are five of the most politically incorrect stories you'll ever listen to! There's a little redneck in all of us, so come and visit our brave hero Cletus and his wife. You'll also meet his friends and a few strange folks along the way. What would you do if druids showed up during hunting season? Have you ever seen the Mona Lisa on a hubcap? Maybe, try your hand at some turkey fishing.

Q: What do a set of LEGO toys, a mountain of cocaine, a glitter-dusted stripper, and a monkey who's grown tired of his dead-end day job have in common? A: Absolutely nothing. Except that they're all key elements in some of the stories featured in this dark and funny collection.

Boston-born first-responder Alex Flynn is back with wry wit and still chasing emergencies in rural Vermont in this tale involving a gas line, a chainsaw, and other things that might or might not go boom and that might or might not go horrible wrong. Eavesdrop on emergency personnel as they attempt to diffuse a dicey situation in this, the first in the Trowbridge Dispatch collection of short stories.

A boy wins $100,000 in a box of Frosted Flakes - only to discover that claiming the winnings may unravel his family. An acclaimed ambulance driver seeks the courage to follow his heart and throw it all away to be a singer-songwriter. A school principal unveils a bold plan to permanently abolish arithmetic. A new arrival in heaven, overwhelmed by infinite options, procrastinates over his long-ago promise to visit his grandmother. We meet a vengeance-minded hare. We learn why wearing a red T-shirt is the key to finding love; how February got its name; and why the stock market is sometimes just...down.

η ανθολογ?α περι?χει δ?κα μικρ?ς και τυχα?ες ιστορ?ες.

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.

"The Story of Doctor Dolittle (Being the History of His Peculiar Life at Home and Astonishing Adventures in Foreign Parts)", written by Hugh Lofting, is the first of his Doctor Dolittle books, a series of children's novels about a man who learns to talk to animals and becomes their champion around the world. John Dolittle, MD. is a respected physician and quiet bachelor living with his spinster sister in the small English village of Puddleby-on-the-Marsh. His love of animals grows over the years.

Gwen’s life has stalled. She’s in her mid-thirties, perpetually single, her friends are busy procreating in the country and conversations with her parents seem to revolve entirely around herbaceous borders and the council’s wheelie-bin timetable. Above all she’s lonely. But then, isn’t everyone? When Gwen’s made redundant from a job she drifted into a decade ago and never left, she realises it’s time to make a change.

Los Angeles and Lucifer are a lot alike. They both seduce and lure with promises of wealth, fame, beauty, or love. But those promises are often empty; and even when they’re not, there’s a price to pay.