Table Talk is a portable dinner party and a book to read alone while laughing out loud. Table Talk is a salon attended by your smartest friends and by all of the wittiest people they know. Table Talk is a collection of brief but critically acclaimed, half serious/half tongue–in–cheek pieces that borrow the format of The New Yorker's "Talk of the Town" column. Selected from several decades of The Threepenny Review, known colloquially as the West Coast's New York Review...

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLEREveryone’s favorite Idiot Girl, Laurie Notaro, is just trying to find the right fit, whether it’s in the adorable blouse that looks charming on the mannequin but leaves her in a literal bind or in her neighborhood after she’s shamefully exposed at a holiday party by delivering a low-quality rendition of “Jingle Bells.” Notaro makes misstep after riotous misstep as she shares tales of marriage and family, including stories about ...

“If Laurie Notaro’s books don’t inspire pants-wetting fits of laughter, then please consult your physician, because, clearly, your funny bone is broken.”—Jen Lancaster, author of I Regret Nothing#1 New York Times bestselling author Laurie Notaro isn’t exactly a domestic goddess—unless that means she fully embraces her genetic hoarding predisposition, sneaks peeks at her husband’s daily journal, or has made a list of the people she wants on her Apo...

Beginning with the piece that made Mark Twain famous--"The Notorious Jumping Frog of Calaveras County"--and ending with his fanciful "How I Edited an Agricultural Paper," this treasure trove of an anthology, an abridgment of the 1888 original, collects twenty of Twain's own pieces, in addition to tall tales, fables, and satires by forty-three of Twain's contemporaries, including Washington Irving, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Ambrose Bierce, William Dean Howells, Joel Chandler Harris, Artemus Wa...

The ancient Greeks were a wonderful people. They gave us democracy, drama, and philosophy, and many forms of art and branches of science would be inconceivable without their influence. And yet, they were capable of the most outlandish behavior, preposterous beliefs, and ludicrous opinions. Like its companion volume, A Cabinet of Roman Curiosities, this is an uproarious miscellany of odd stories and facts, culled from a lifetime of teaching ancient Greek civilization. In some ways,...

This book, newly updated, contains now several HTML tables of contents that will make reading a real pleasure!The first table of contents (at the very beginning of the ebook) lists the titles of all novels included in this volume. By clicking on one of those titles you will be redirected to the beginning of that work, where you'll find a new TOC that lists all the chapters and sub-chapters of that specific work.Here you will find the complete novels of Migue...

In 1981, Norman Murphy caused a minor stir in literary circles when he published In Search of Blandings, which demonstrated that many of P.G. Wodehouse's legendary characters and settings were based on fact. In the two volumes of A Wodehouse Handbook, he reveals his findings across a wider field - the world that Wodehouse lived in and the sources of the many quotations and references Wodehouse used so brilliantly. In Volume 1, he tells us of Winston Churchill's first public speech; of Sam ...

Following everyone from Frankenstein’s Monster to King Lear’s Fool, Charles Dickens to Virginia Woolf, this is a loving spoof of our literary favorites, and a hilarious collection for a twenty-first century generation of readers. Long live the Classics: 2.0!When humorist Sarah Schmelling transformed Hamlet into a Facebook news feed on McSweeney’s, it launched the next big humor trend—Facebook lit. In this world, the king “pokes” the queen, Hamlet...

They say laughter is the best medicine, so this picture book comes as your doctor's prescription. This book is a collection of funny pictures from all over the world. This is the perfect go-to should you feel cranky or too stressed to smile. Open the pages of this book and you'll have a good time!

Jews and humor is, for most people, a natural and felicitous collocation. In spite of, or perhaps because of, a history of crises and living on the edge, Jews have often created or resorted to humor. But what is humor? And what makes certain types, instances, or performances of humor "Jewish"? These are among the myriad queries addressed by the fourteen authors whose essays are collected in this volume. And, thankfully, their observations, always apt and often witty, are expressed with a l...

Immortal Comedy is the first book to 'think' philosophically about the comic phenomenon in general. Although author Agnes Heller had written a book that is both deeply scholarly and meditative on the subject of the comic form in film, literature, and life her writing is eminently approachable. In both its subject and style, Immortal Comedy is a seminal book. In it, Heller takes us on a journey through theories of comedy beginning with classical thought. She then detours through foundationa...

**Henri Bergson — LaughterGeorge Meredith — An Essay on ComedyIntroduction & Appendix on The Meanings of Comedy by Wylie Sypher**Laughter is a mystery—a mystery which defines man. Brought together in this volume are two classic studies of the nature of laughter and comedy. The great French philosopher Henri Bergson develops, in "Laughter," a profound psychological and philisophic theory of the main springs of comedy—a theory closely related...