These stories are linked by humor, setting, themes and recurring characters-cat lovers, murderers, gamblers, ghosts and fools-but mostly by the movie stars, gods and goddesses who look down on us struggling mortals with a mixture of benevolence and wrath. From Scarlett Johansson to Joan Crawford, Clint Eastwood to Jerry Lewis, they represent the impossible ideals to which lesser beings turn for hope in an otherwise baffling world.

How does Southern food look from the outside? The form is caught in constantly dueling stereotypes: It’s so often imagined as either the touchingly down-home feast or the heartstopping health scourge of a nation. But as any Southern transplant will tell you once they’ve spent time in the region, Southerners share their lives in food, with a complex mix of stories of belonging and not belonging and of traditions that form identities of many kinds.Cornbread Nation 7, edited ...

Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things.Smokers, survivalists, teenagers, collectors…. The cigarette lighter is a charged, complex, yet often entirely disposable object that moves across these various groups of people, acquiring and emitting different meanings while always supplying its primary function, that of ignition. While the lighter may seem at first a niche object-only for old fashioned cigarette smokers-in t...

A new collection of stories from the Pushcart Prize-winning author of The Mysterious Secret of the Valuable Treasure.Glittering with mischief and perversity, Jack Pendarvis’s latest collection of short fiction introduces readers to a world of losers poised on the brink of all sorts of disaster – a world only a wink and a nod away from our own.In the title novella a fundamentalist teenager must single-handedly confront the horrors of a spiritual quest filled...

This debut collection of stories holds a fun house mirror to the everyday lives of characters as empathetic as they are absurd.You’ve met the characters in The Mysterious Secret of the Valuable Treasure. They’re the quirky visionaries and misguided dreamers we all know. . .and might even be. These characters are absurd, hilarious, and completely believable.From the self-appointed historian of the title piece to the frustrated wage slaves of "Our Spring Cata...

Discover a more lighthearted side of the funeral industry in this collection of real-life stories from the authors of Mortuary Confidential.Not knowing what to do, I sat on the church steps and waited. As the gravity of my failure began to well up in me, I began to cry . . . I Had Lost The Hearse!Funerals and the all the things that accompany them are traditionally somber, contemplative events in which the bereaved look to their undertaker...

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • PEN/FAULKNER AWARD FINALIST • From the two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Underground Railroad and The Nickel Boys: a hilarious and supremely original novel set in the Hamptons in the 1980s, "a tenderhearted coming-of-age story fused with a sharp look at the intersections of race and class” (The New York Times).Benji Cooper is one of the few Black students at an elite prep school in Manhattan. But every su...

A collection of humorous and nostalgic Americana stories—the beloved, bestselling classics that inspired the movie A Christmas StoryBefore Garrison Keillor and Spalding Gray there was Jean Shepherd: a master monologist and writer who spun the materials of his all-American childhood into immensely resonant—and utterly hilarious—works of comic art. In God We Trust: All Others Pay Cash represents one of the peaks of his achievement, a compound of iro...

National Humor Month won't be the same with this huge, classic collection of side-splitting, groan-worthy, family-friendly jokes, puns, and riddles. Guaranteed LOLs at a time we can all use a laugh.Between these covers are a staggering 3650 entries - at a joke a day that's 10 full years of comedy! With chapters on everything from Modern Romance, the Working World and Aging to Pop Culture, Money, and much more, 3650 Jokes, Puns and Riddles contains the most...

“Damn, this book is good.”—**Jon Stewart“A biting, darkly hilarious collection of personal essays that begs to be read aloud.”—Chicago Tribune**Emmy Award–winning writer Adam Resnick began his career at Late Night with David Letterman before honing his chops in movies and cable television, including HBO’s The Larry Sanders Show. While courageously admitting to being “euphorically antisocial,” Resnick plunges readers deep into his ...

"[Offering] poetry, sex, Catholicism, drugs, class, and sexuality . . . Myles's hard-talking, lyrical autobiographical novel" is available for a new generation (Deborah Levy, The New Statesman ).In this breathtakingly inventive autobiographical novel, Eileen Myles transforms life into a work of art. Told in her audacious voice, made vivid and immediate in her lyrical language, Chelsea Girls cobbles together memor...

INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER"Thank you to Sheila Nevins for putting all this down for posterity. Women need this kind of honest excavation of the process of living." —Meryl StreepAn astonishingly frank, funny, poignant book for any woman who wishes they had someone who would say to them, "This happened to me, learn from my mistakes and my successes. Because you don't get smarter as you get older, you get braver...