Humorous fiction Books

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...

In this political satire-thriller, we follow a government official, an exiled influencer, and a burned-out delivery driver, living through a culture obsessed presidency that signs the policy toKill the Rich.The year is 2038, America's new President won...

A woman's lover commits suicide. Why does everyone expect her to grieve?What if he wasn't one of the good ones? Was his suicide another cruelty? Her grief and rage are expressed through increasingly violent sexual encounters with strangers,...

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...

Tuesday night is trivia night, a night for produce market owner Lee Hubbs to swing by the bar with his cop friend, a night to down a few shots and avoid all the folks who've mysteriously been turning into quails. It's a night to kick back and maybe get...

Mike Kovacs is an economics professor who's trying to get over a bitter divorce. He's barely on speaking terms with his only child. And he's just killed two bicyclists in an inebriated hit-and-run at a deserted Michigan beach. (In his defense, he hadn't...

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...

The famous bi-sexual libertine who would be more at home on Tinder than at a Roman Cathedral, gallivants through the streets like brush strokes to become a Baroque 16th century icon.The year is 1604 and Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio is a superstar,...

The heavyweight of hardcore horror returns with ten hard hitting new short stories and seven brutal epic poems exploring the darkest soul of humanity and the cruelty of life without pulling punches. Wrath James White turns his unflinching eye upon the...

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...

Tyrone has a problem. Several problems, in fact: a girlfriend who sleeps around, a boss he's sleeping with, and various types of guilt (Catholic, Jewish, White) he can't live without. Plus, there's his deceased mother, his pill-popping father (who at...

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...

Not unlike his literary forebearers Donald Barthelme and Robert Coover, Damian Dressick brings us a crackling series of dispatches fresh from the postmodernist front.This daring gathering of brief, innovative stories tantalizes the intellect nearly as...

Darryl Cook is a man who seems to have everything: a quiet home in Western Oregon, a beautiful wife, and a lot of friends to fuck her while he watches.But as he explores the cuckolding lifestyle, he finds himself tugging at threads that threaten to...

The Paradox Twins is a copyright infringing biographical collage that exists on the Internet, pieced together by an unknown auteur.Named for the famous thought experiment, it concerns estranged twin brothers who reunite at their father's funeral to...

Life of the Party will leave you with a hangover and a "VIP" stamp on your heart. Hacic crafts a Beat novel for the Instagram generation.This dark comedy dives into the underbelly of Milanese fashion and nightlife, through the eyes of Mia, a young expat...

A Darkly Humorous Collection of Cartoons Rejected by The New Yorker

"Like Lloyd Kaufman and Sam Raimi's mutant offspring."-Wil Wheaton"Reminiscent of a modern William Faulkner."-Lloyd Kaufman, President of Troma Entertainment and creator of The Toxic Avenger

"Trainspotting set against a grim post-Soviet backdrop." - NewsweekWorld Literature Today's Recommended Summer Reads 2016A city-dwelling executive heads home to take over his brother's gas station after his mysterious disappearance, but all he finds at...

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...

"The interconnected works of Volodine-think Faulkner, but after an apocalypse-constitute the most exciting project in contemporary French literature."-Maria ClementiThat is what we had called post-exoticism. It was a construction connected to...

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...

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...

Take one long-married and occasionally exasperated couple getting along in years, their well meaning daughter and precocious grandson, a clueless dog, an independent minded cat, plus assorted other quirky but endearing characters and you have the world...

First paperback edition. Brite has a rich and dedicated readership among readers of gay, cooking, horror, and mystery fiction. Brite and her husband, a chef, live in New Orleans. Since Hurricane Katrina she has moved away from fiction. This book features...

The Ching RoomA pitch-black two-hander set in a toilet cubicle.Rory realises he is out of his depth once he becomes trapped by the terrifying and enigmatic drug-dealer, Darren.Cast size: 2M."Has subtle depth as a meditation on drug culture... The...

It is 1989 and a seemingly invincible Prime Minister has sacked Geoffrey Howe, her Foreign Secretary. She apparently had nothing to fear from him: his speaking skills had, famously, been compared to those of a dead sheep. But, a year later, inspired by...

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...

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...

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...

How to Build a Girl meets Fleabag in this sparkling novel about coming of age and the agony of modern relationshipsMeet Tabitha Gray, a delusional girl from Topanga, California, who redefines what it means to be a truly hopeless romantic. Tabby suffers...

A National Book Award winner, this bawdy, comic trio of novellas finds John Barth injecting his signature wit into three tales many times told: that of Scheherazade, storyteller of the Thousand and One Nights; of Perseus, slayer of Medusa; and of...

First (authorised) publication (in any language) of a wildly popular, anonymously written serial novel that started life as a blog during the US invasion of IraqPopulated by a cast of imagined con artists, holy fools, drag queens, and partisans - as well...

Ann Quin's wildest, funniest, freakiest, kinkiest, and best novel - a road-trip novel, a graphic novel, a spy novel, a Beat novel, an anti-novel - is available again, to inspire a new generation of mavericks.First published in 1972, Ann Quin's fourth and...

Finalist for the 2024 Governor General's Literary Award in Translation AGlobe and Mail Most Anticipated Spring Title Don Quixote meets Who Framed Roger Rabbit in this slapstick epic about destiny, family demons, and revenge.1911. A hockey game in...