Humorous fiction

A uniquely humorous and deeply profound novel from a legendary stand-up comedian that follows the thoughts of a 1960s third grader during a single day at school.Steven Wright is one of the most significant and influential stand-up comedians in history...

'Seven Exes made me laugh out loud. It's fresh, fast-paced and joyous. Lucy Vine's writing is so warm and funny - her books are the literary equivalent of an amazing girls' night out' BETH O'LEARY Esther is out with her two friends, bemoaning her lack of...

It should have been a grand slam...Gabriel Torres thought his life after major league baseball would be simple and quiet—or at least quieter. However, as he takes over running the exclusive Players Club, he finds himself constantly embroiled in scandal...

‘Crazy, sexy, cool: Caroline Kepnes gets better – and Joe Goldberg gets worse – with every book’ ERIN KELLY'Caroline Kepnes writes with such malevolent energy, such dark grace and such ink-black humour. An utterly unique character and an utterly unique...

Lucas Davenport and Virgil Flowers join forces on a deadly maritime case like no other . . .  An off-duty Coast Guardsman is fishing with his family when he calls in some suspicious behaviour from a nearby boat. The slick craft has stopped to...

'Ignore everything you think you’re meant to be doing, and bunker down with this.’ Better ReadingBig Little Lies meets Marian Keyes with a dash of Donna Hay; a deliciously hilarious, honest and heartfelt portrayal of modern-day motherhood and the...

Words are messy. Love is messier. A hilarious, insightful new novel from the creators of Books on the RailMeet Beatrix Babbage – 29-year-old dog-earer of books and accidental destroyer of weddings.After ruining her best friend's nuptials, Bea relocates...

Best buds DJ and Parker cannot wait to go trick-or-treating until - BOO! Halloween scares and mysterious spells make them shudder. Could someone they know be a REAL witch? Haunted Hazel uses onomatopoeia to create opportunities for learning and laughter...

In FAST FICTION, you'll enter a cafe where the menu is loaded with nothing but literary appetizers, designed to be quickly consumed and easily digested. You'll meet people with secrets and others who wished they knew how to keep them; characters looking...

"The Karma Kaper" stars Walter and Barry Shore, twin brothers and business partners. An Armenian crime family invests $10 million into a Barry Shore Productions film. When the film never materializes, the Armenians call the loan. When Barry doesn't pay,...

Two Belgian exiles, both called Tony Hanssen, are on the run from their former lives on different continents. In Buenos Aires one of the Tony Hanssens, a former cruise director, is playing a dangerous game as a toy boy to the elderly wife of a wealthy...

A funny, boisterous, and deeply moving novel about aging hairstylist Roland's childhood friendship with Birdy O'Day, whose fevered quest for pop music glory drives them apart.Roland Keener is an aging hairstylist who's lived...

A trans woman sets out to exploit a group of wealthy roommates, only to fall under the spell of their glamorous, hedonistic lifestyle in tech-bubble San Francisco.Years after fleeing San Francisco and getting sober, Jhanvi has made a life for herself...

Can killing be an act of love? Hypnotic, gruesome, and exultant, Joy Sorman's macabre ballet whirls from industrial slaughterhouses to the boutique butcher shops of Paris.Pim is a delicate youth-stringy, solemn, and prone to bouts of unexplained weeping...

Elya is the lad with the vision, and Elya has the map. Ziv and Kiva aren't so sure. The water may run out before they find the Village of Lakes. The food may run out before the flaky crescent pastries of Prune Town. They may never reach the Village of...

Saving an alien planet is nothing compared to meeting your sales quota. Marcus Aimond, untrained tag-along aboard humanity's first intergalactic exploratory commerce vessel, has a singular mission: sell off-brand misprinted merchandise.When the rookie...

Saving an alien planet is nothing compared to meeting your sales quota. Marcus Aimond, untrained tag-along aboard humanity's first intergalactic exploratory commerce vessel, has a singular mission: sell off-brand misprinted merchandise.When the rookie...

A philosophy professor tests the limits of the soul and body by performing dehumanizing experiments on unwilling subjects, after the department is closed due to budget cuts.Violent Faculties follows a philosophy professor influenced by Sade and Bataille...

A farcical biography of Ulysses S. Grant,You, Me, and Ulysses S. Grantis a history lesson disguised as an uproarious novel. Spanning from Grant's birth until his victory over the Confederacy,You, Me, and Ulysses S. Grantgives us an honest-warts and...

Sometimes to save the world, you've got to punch a few dragons...When the planet is being eaten by interdimensional parasites who literally tear holes in reality, what do you do? If you're Charlie Chase, you dive headfirst into an interdimensional...

Bad Foundationsis a comedic absurdist novel about a home foundation inspector whose own home life is falling apart.Cook does not have an ordinary job. He spends his days inspecting people's crawl spaces, cataloging their filth and photographing the decay...

Bridget Jones's Diary meets Douglas Coupland's Microserfs Supremacy Software is the world's largest video-game developer and publisher. They're the shining light, a dream job for many aspiring game developers.Who Hunts the Whale? tells the story...

'Fresh, authentic and darkly funny. It's a beautifully told story full of warmth and emotion without ever being sentimental - I absolutely loved it' Ruth Hogan, bestselling author of The Keeper of Lost ThingsIt's the heatwave summer of 1976 and...

Tiddles is a suave, carefree kitty cat whose only pleasures in life are eating mice, wooing the ladies, and being generally apathetic toward his owner, Jake. But when a toxic spill occurs outside of town, Tiddles finds himself savagely attacked by a...

His first new collection of short humour infifteen years is classic Woody Allen.Zero Gravity is the fifth collection of comic pieces by Woody Allen, a hilarious prose stylist whose enduring appeal readers have savoured since his classics Getting Even,...

Pest presents the bizarre events that lead a new, parallel life for a man named Chalo as a wild yak living in the Himalayas.Chalo the man is recruited by a latter day prophet named Grant to design and build a campus on Catalina Island, where initiates...

"A writer contends with slavery's legacy, and his own link to it . . . Daring in both scope and imagination."-The New York TimesA stellar novel rendered into a darkly comic, unforgettable narrative by Booker International Prize winning translator Jessica...

The eleven stories in Sweetlust interweave feminist critique, intertextuality, and science fiction tropes in an irreverent portrait of our past, present, and future.In a dystopian world with no men, women are "rehabilitated" at an erotic amusement park...

Now in paperback-bestselling author and humorist Garrison Keillor returns to one of America's most beloved mythical towns, beset by a contagion of alarming candor.A mysterious virus has infiltrated the good people of Lake Wobegon, transmitted via...

From Man Booker International Prize finalist Josip Novakovich comes a satiric novel with teeth-a tale of Russia in the early aughts, perfect for fans of Dostoevsky and Gary Shteyngart.In this picaresque novel set in the early 2000s, David, an investment...

Like Louis-Ferdinand Cline meets Larry DavidThe nights were terrible, during the day we were occupied, but at night we got to thinking, picturing food, our houses, food again, painful memories from our childhoods-that abominable era-would mix with images...

Loss and rediscovery occupy the heart of this adventurous collection. The characters in Eternal Night at the Nature Museum find refuge in strange, repurposed spaces: a middle-aged addict emcees a demolition derby, which transforms into a hostel, then a...

Nominated for the 2016 PEN Translation Prize One of Flavorwire's Top 50 Independent Books of 2015 One of Entropy Magazine's Best Fiction Books of 2015 One of Bookriot's 100 Must-Read Books Translated From French Sphinx is the remarkable debut novel,...

Noir meets diverse voices and transforms the genre into an over-the-top, transcendental psychedelic thriller ride of pulpy goodness in THE OBAMA INHERITANCE, a collection of fifteen stories of conspiracy noir curated by editor and award-winning...

This collection acts as compendium of George Singleton'swork forboth devoteess and readers who may not have encountered his stories before.These are deeply funny stories that will make you laugh out loud, butalso hit on sad, human truths. Singleton is a...

Calloustown, the seventh collection from master raconteur George Singleton, who's been praised by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution as the "unchallenged king of the comic Southern short story," finds the author at the absolute top of his game as he traces...

A new story collection focused on the Heartland from Michael Martone, one of America's most prolific and important contemporary authors.In Plain Air: Sketches from Winesburg, Indiana, Michael Martone places steady fingers on the arrhythmic pulse of the...

Meet Vanessa Salomon, a privileged and misanthropic French-American translator hailing from a wealthy Parisian family. Her twin sister is a famous movie star, which Vanessa resents deeply and daily. The only man Vanessa ever loved recently killed himself...

The Mexico we hear of in the news - the drug cartels, migration and senseless violence - is rich soil for Herrera's moving stories of people who live in this reality but also live in the timeless realm of myth, epic and fairy tale, such as the singer...

Tired of being ashamed of your body? Ask your doctor if this journey to the dark heart of American masculinity is right for you!In a broken-down Middle American town, the disintegration of a struggling family-its ambitions and emotions worn thin-is laid...

Never before available in the United States, Robert Aickman's bizarre and timeless masterpiece!Completed by Robert Aickman in 1975, but never before published in the US and not widely in the UK, Go Back at Once is a delicious, delirious comic fantasy...

A teacher asked me a question, and I opened my mouth as a sort of formality but closed it softly, knowing with perfect certainty that nothing would ever come out again.Ruby gives up talking at a young age. Her mother isn't always there to notice; she...

Rose Macaulay's 1920 satire on British journalism and the newspaper industry will be back in print in the UK for the first time in seventy years. It will be published alongside a new collection of her pacifist writing from 1916 to 1945, Non-Combatants...

A love story in the slow lane, a road novel from Stoke-on-Trent to Wales, a stolen caravan, and a salesman who kidnaps the love of his life - this is a journey of self-discovery for an odd couple of 60-somethings: childhood sweethearts reunited in later...

An underemployed chef is pulled into the escalating violence of his neighbour's makeshift porn channel. An elderly piano student is forced to flee her home village when word gets out that she's had sex with her thirty-something teacher. A hose pumping...

'Kings, lords, liars, usherettes, goal-hangers, gun-men and prostitutes. Whether or not these stories bear any relation to life as it is lived in Endland (sic) is not my problem and good riddance to all those who prefer to read about truly good, lucky...

'I don't expect anyone to believe me,' warns the narrator of this novel, a Mexican student called Juan Pablo Villalobos. He is about to fly to Barcelona on a scholarship when he's kidnapped in a bookshop and whisked away by thugs to a basement...