Kategoria BISAC: Fiction >> Humorous - Black Humor

The less-than-innocents abroad in these short novels are Americans in Europe, involved in what turn out to be pleasure tours of hell: shocking, bewildering trips that change forever their ideas about history, reality, politics, sex -- their entire lives.

In the title novella, a third-rate American playwright named Landau attends a literary conference in Prague, where an organized group excursion to a former concentration camp degenerates into a battle of wills and an exercise in egomania and public humiliation. Nina, the heroine of the second novella, "Three Pigs in Five Days," is...

It starts as a lark for Jasmin Field, the charming, acerbically witty columnist for a national women's magazine. She joins a host of celebraties gathering in London to audition for the season's most dazzling charity event: a one-night only stage production of Jane Austen's immortal Pride and Prejudice, directed by and starring the Academy Award -- winning Hollywood heartthrob Harry Noble. And nobody is more surprised than Jasmin herself when she lands the lead of handsome Harry's love interest, Elizabeth Bennet. But things start to go very wrong very quickly. Ms. Field's delicious...

Flannery Culp wants you to know the whole story of her spectacularly awful senior year. Tyrants, perverts, tragic crushes, gossip, cruel jokes, and the hallucinatory effects of absinthe -- Flannery and the seven other friends in the Basic Eight have suffered through it all. But now, on tabloid television, they're calling Flannery a murderer, which is a total lie. It's true that high school can be so stressful sometimes. And it's true that sometimes a girl just has to kill someone. But Flannery wants you to know that she's not a murderer at all -- she's a murderess.

Meet Tom Ripple, a man with an uncommon outlook on his common life. Through the vividness of his voice and his growing sense of the sorrow and absurdity of the world, Tom Ripple becomes an unusually appealing antihero, aware of his ordinariness and the limits of his intelligence, with a ribald sense of humor, and a clumsiness in his attempts at emotional connection with others. He is a bewildered everyman navigating his way through modern times.

By turns poignant, funny, heartbreaking, and profound, It's All Right Now is a towering achievement and a singular work of the...

struggling mortician in working-class Rome, Freda only married her repulsive ventriloquist husband, Alberto, because it was prophesied that she'd do so. Now that he's vanished mysteriously along with his equally abhorrent dummy (who Freda suspects is actually a midget), she'd like them both to stay missing -- though she's devastated by the simultaneous disappearance of her soul mate, Pierino, her beloved talking parrot. While the police investigate this series of possible crimes, Freda will continue embalming by day, unleashing her caged passions at night in a seedy cabaret (until a tragic...

Before Bridget Jones, Carrie Bradshaw, and the Shopaholic, it was a world of Fabulous Nobodies

Now, back in print after fifteen years, it's your chance to experience this hysterically wild cult-status novel for the first time.

Get ready to meet:

Reality Nirvana Tuttle
A self-described "doorwhore" at one of Manhattan's hottest clubs. She never gets up before 2 P.M. and has vivid, two-way conversations with every dress in her closet.

Hugo "A Go-Go" Falk
Gossip columnist and documenter of all things fabulous in the fashion scene. This man is the key...

Ten masterworks of short fiction--by turns tender, comic, powerful, and devastating--from the highly praised author of The Madonnas of Leningrad

A surprised Southern matriarch is confronted by her family at an intervention. . . . A life-altering breakin triggers insomniac introspection in a desperate actor. . . . Streetwise New York City neighbors let down their guard for a naive puppeteer and must suffer the consequences. . . .
In this stunning collection of short stories--five of which are being published for the very first time bestselling, award-winning author...

When smart, successful, levelheaded lawyer Alexis Pearson gets blindsided by her faithless fiance, who disses and dumps her, she decides to change everything. Gone are the trendy dreads in favor of her own soft and natural tresses. She's going to get her body, mind, and spirit in shape with tae kwan do classes -- and maybe kick some butt in the process to work out the aggression brought on by the abandonment . . . and her boss's unsubtle offers to help mend her busted heart. Of course, she never intended for it all to get out of hand -- and she certainly didn't mean to...

It has been years since Swenson, a professor in a New England creative writing program, has published a novel. It's been even longer since any of his students have shown promise. Enter Angela Argo, a pierced, tattooed student with a rare talent for writing. Angela is just the thing Swenson needs. And, better yet, she wants his help. But, as we all know, the road to hell is paved with good intentions. . . .

Deliciously risque, Blue Angel is a withering take on today's academic mores and a scathing tale that vividly shows what can happen when academic politics collides with...

A dazzling collection of stories, The Prophet of Zongo Street takes readers to a world that seamlessly blends African folklore and myths with modernity. Set primarily on Zongo Street, a fictitious community in West Africa, the stories -- which are reminiscent of the works of Ben Okri and Amos Tutuola -- introduce us to wonderfully quirky characters and the most uproarious, poignant, and rawest moments of life. There's Kumi, the enigmatic title character who teaches a young boy to finally ask questions of his traditions. And as Ali moves his characters to America we meet Felix, who...

She was the mysterious woman in the long black cloak. He was the sexy guy next door. They shared a common wall between their Capitol Hill townhouses and not much else -- until disaster scored a direct hit on the mystery woman's bedroom and the sexy guy's heart. He baked her a cake, she learned to throw a football, there were some misunderstandings in the living room, some mishaps in the yard, and some romantic moments everywhere....

The third novel in the beloved Tales of the City series, Armistead Maupin's best-selling San Francisco saga, soon to return to television as a Netflix original series once again starring Laura Linney and Olympia Dukakis.

The calamity-prone residents of 28 Barbary Lane are at it again in this deliciously dark novel of romance and betrayal. While Anna Madrigal imprisons an anchorwoman in her basement, Michael Tolliver looks for love at the National Gay Rodeo, DeDe Halcyon Day and Mary Ann Singleton track a charismatic psychopath across Alaska, and society...

The two main occupations in Limoges, Louisiana (population: 905), seem to be spreading juicy gossip and consoling the unfortunate with casseroles. And in this early spring of 1952, there is ample opportunity for both—with sixteen-year-old and pregnant (by the Baptist minister) Olive Nepper, currently languishing in a coma after drinking pop laced with rose poison. But the plight of Olive and her family is hardly the only story spicing up the rumor mill in this small Southern community of unpredictable eccentrics, wandering husbands, and unsatisfied wives—and few local sins will...

Rich in its stories, characters, and imaginative range, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting is the novel that brought Milan Kundera his first big international success in the late 1970s. Like all his work, it is valuable for far more than its historical implications. In seven wonderfully integrated parts, different aspects of human existence are magnified and reduced, reordered and emphasized, newly examined, analyzed, and experienced.

Juxtaposing a trip to his childhood home -- where he has retreated to try to make some sense of his hectic existence in New York City -- with memories of growing up gay in seventies suburbia, Albo creates "Mike Albo." This character's memories are from a fictitious life that's outrageous, hilarious, and embarrassingly real. From a typical suburban childhood to his perpetual search for true love, Albo evokes a poignant, nostalgic past and a vibrant, energetic present. By turns vulnerable and jaded, flamboyant and obsessive, Hornito is full of subversive humor and outrageous...

Jack Madigan is, by many accounts, blessed. He can still effortlessly turn a pretty head. And thanks to his legendary rock star father, he lives an enviable existence in a once-glorious, now-crumbling Boston town house with his teenage son, Harlan. But there is one tiny drawback: Jack is an agoraphobe. As long as his dad's admittedly dwindling royalties keep rolling in, Jack's condition isn't a problem. But then the money runs out . . . and all hell breaks loose.

The bank is foreclosing. Jack's ex is threatening to take Harlan to California. And Lucinda, the little girl next door,...

"It began as a mistake." By middle age, Henry Chinaski has lost more than twelve years of his life to the U.S. Postal Service. In a world where his three true, bitter pleasures are women, booze, and racetrack betting, he somehow drags his hangover out of bed every dawn to lug waterlogged mailbags up mud-soaked mountains, outsmart vicious guard dogs, and pray to survive the day-to-day trials of sadistic bosses and certifiable coworkers. This classic 1971 novel--the one that catapulted its author to national fame--is the perfect introduction to the grimly hysterical world of legendary...

How-life writer and unrepentant alcoholic Henry Chinaski was born to survive. After decades of slacking off at low-paying dead-end jobs, blowing his cash on booze and women, and scrimping by in flea-bitten apartments, Chinaski sees his poetic star rising at last. Now, at fifty, he is reveling in his sudden rock-star life, running three hundred hangovers a year, and maintaining a sex life that would cripple Casanova.

With all of Bukowski's trademark humor and gritty, dark honesty, this 1978 follow-up to Post Office and Factotum is an uncompromising account of life on...

He lied, he cheated. He destroyed her life.

How difficult could killing him be?

Madeline Piatro devoted four years of her life to her boyfriend Carlton--and, in return, got romance, flowers, and the best sex she'd ever had. But then he dumped her--by e-mail, no less He used her, he broke her heart...and he even cost her the marketing job she dearly loved. Now Maddy's on a mission. She wants revenge and she wants her career back.

But Maddy's about to discover that getting even, no matter how justifiable, isn't as easy as it might at first appear--even with a batch of...

Hank Mallone knows he's in trouble when Maggie Toone agrees to pretend to be his wife in order to improve his rogue's reputation. Will his harebrained scheme to get a bank loan for his business backfire once Maggie arrives in his small Vermont town and lets the gossips take a look?

Maggie never expected her employer to be drop-dead handsome, but she's too intrigued by his offer to say no . . . and too eager to escape a life that made her feel trapped. The deal is strictly business, both agree, until Hank turns out to be every fantasy she ever had.