Humour Short

Lucas knows the perfect night entails just three things: video games, wine, and pad thai. Peanuts are a must! Other people? Not so much. Why complicate things when he’s happy alone? Then one day the apartment board, a vexing trio of authority, rings his doorbell. And Lucas’s solitude takes a startling hike. They demand to see his frying pan. Someone left one next to the recycling room overnight, and instead of removing the errant object, as Lucas suggests, they insist on finding the guilty party. But their plan backfires. Colossally.

Maud is an irascible 88-year-old Swedish woman with no family, no friends, and...no qualms about a little murder. Ever since her darling father's untimely death when she was only 18, Maud has lived in the family's spacious apartment in downtown Gothenburg rent-free, thanks to a minor clause in a hastily negotiated contract. That was how Maud learned that good things can come from tragedy. Now in her late 80s, Maud contents herself with traveling the world and surfing the net from the comfort of her father's ancient armchair. It's a solitary existence, and she likes it that way.

By day, Mark Wojcik can be found elbow-deep in engine grease, making cars and trucks safe for the highway. By night, he can be found traipsing through the wilds of Pennsylvania, making the world safe for humans. He's more than just a mechanic, he's a New Templar Knight. He travels the backroads and byways fighting weresquonks, ningen, selkies, ghosts, and . . . gnomes? Is that gnome . . . naked? (Sigh.) Season One collects the first four novellas in the Spells, Salt, & Steel series: Spells, Salt, & Steel; Open Season; Deep Trouble; and Close Encounters.

A seriously entertaining collection of feelgood stories guaranteed to put the smile back on your face written especially by 10 best-selling novelists. From a hilarious race against time to a moment of unexpected eavesdropping, from righting wrongs in rural India to finding joy in unlikely places, these stories are all rich in wit and humour, guaranteed to lift your spirits and warm your heart.

H.H. Munro (Saki) is one of the undisputed masters of the short story. In this complete compendium, the full gamut of his subjects and themes is experienced. His stories are imbued with humorous satire, biting irony, and often the macabre, all of which have one target: the stupidities and hypocrisies of Edwardian upper-class society.

Small Bones in a Fist is composed of stories drawn from Blindboy's first two published books: The Gospel According to Blindboy and Boulevard Wren and Other Stories. Curated, narrated and scored by the author, Small Bones in a Fist is a surreal, provocative and darkly funny introduction to one of the most original voices in Irish literature.

From the creator of the beloved and universally acclaimed television series BoJack Horseman, a fabulously off-beat collection of short stories about love - the best and worst thing in the universe. Equally at home with the surreal and the painfully relatable (and both at once), Bob-Waksberg delivers a killer combination of humor, romance, whimsy, cultural commentary, and crushing emotional vulnerability.

On the 12th floor of the Acme Building, on a cold February day in St. Paul, Guy Noir looks down the barrel of a loaded revolver in the hands of geezer gangster Joey Roast Beef, who is demanding to hear what lucrative scheme Guy is cooking up with stripper-turned-women's-studies-professor Naomi Fallopian. Everyone wants to know, and Guy faces them one by one, as he and Naomi pursue a dream of earning gazillions by selling a surefire method of dramatic weight loss.

In David Sedaris' world, no one is safe and no cow is sacred. A manic cross between Mark Leyner, Fran Lebowitz, and the National Enquirer, Sedaris' collection of essays is a rollicking tour through the national Zeitgeist: a do-it-yourself suburban dad saves money by performing home surgery; a man who is loved too much flees the heavyweight champion of the world; a teenage suicide tries to incite a lynch mob at her funeral; a bitter Santa abuses the elves.

A boy wins $100,000 in a box of Frosted Flakes - only to discover that claiming the winnings may unravel his family. An acclaimed ambulance driver seeks the courage to follow his heart and throw it all away to be a singer-songwriter. A school principal unveils a bold plan to permanently abolish arithmetic. A new arrival in heaven, overwhelmed by infinite options, procrastinates over his long-ago promise to visit his grandmother. We meet a vengeance-minded hare. We learn why wearing a red T-shirt is the key to finding love; how February got its name; and why the stock market is sometimes just...down.

Swords. Sorcery. Dick Jokes. Truly do the gods smile upon you, dear listener, for the first four books in the hilarious Caverns and Creatures series are now available in one audiobook set. Join Tim, Dave, Julian, and Cooper as they are thrown into a hostile fantasy world filled with magic and monsters, and ruled over by a cruel and sadistic game master who taunts and harasses them while he sits back and eats their fried chicken.

The brilliantly quirky David Sedaris returns with a book of acerbic and outrageously funny stories about animals who have unmistakably human failings.This collection of sharply observed animal-themed tales is a delight, told with David Sedaris’s trademark blend of hilarity and goodnaturedness. Though the characters may not be human, the situations in these stories bear an uncanny resemblance to the insanity of our own everyday interactions.

A collection of the comic master's early stories of perpetually in-the-soup Bertie Wooster and his unflappable valet Jeeves, including their debut in "Extricating Young Gussie" and all 28 stories from "The Inimitable Jeeves" and "Carry On, Jeeves".

Twelve early stories from the comic master, including the romantic truth behind the odd success of a Soho restaurant; the mysterious ways of a lucky black cat; a tale of three exiled baseball fans; a private detective in love with an actress in a touring company; a policeman in love with a parlor maid in the Battersea Park Road; Mr. Henry Wallace Mills of the two left feet; and the first appearance of Bertie Wooster and Jeeves, as Bertie is sent to New York to rescue his cousin from the clutches of a Vaudeville starlet...

To listen to The Little World of Don Camillo is to travel to the valley of the River Po, Italy's widest and most fertile plain, with its unique atmosphere, culture, and natural history. And to do so in the incomparable company of a cast of fictional characters who testify to the exquisite humor and humanity of their creator. Here, eternal forces grapple with the absurd drama of everyday life, and hilarious and unearthly things can happen.

From Roald Dahl, the master of the sting in the tail, a newly collected audiobook of his darkest stories, read by Will Self, Adrian Scarborough, Stephanie Beacham, Andrew Scott, Richard E Grant, Tamsin Greig, Mark Heap, Juliet Stevenson and Jessica Hynes. Even when we mean to be kind we can sometimes be cruel. We all have streaks of nastiness inside us. In these ten tales of cruelty, master storyteller Roald Dahl explores how and why it is we make others suffer.

The first volume of Wodehouse's brilliant complete and unabridged short stories. Originally a semi-novel, this version contains self-contained stories which are nonetheless linked, often by Bingo Little, an endearingly hopeless chap and a serial romancer.

Newly married to novelist Rosie M. Banks, Bingo bucks the current trend by being extremely happy, although he does tend to lose his shirt on various horses. This collection of wonderfully funny stories features a cast of outrageous characters.

Acclaimed author of The Adults Alison Espach’s short story "In-Depth Market Research Interviews with Dead People" is an at-once hilarious and heart-breaking portrait of a dead woman’s marriage and the Volvo that stood in the middle of it all.

Two years after my mother died, my father fell in love with a glamorous blonde Ukrainian divorcee. He was 84 and she was 36. She exploded into our lives like a fluffy pink grenade, churning up the murky water, bringing to the surface sludge of sloughed-off memories, giving the family ghosts a kick up the backside. Sisters Vera and Nadezhda must put aside a lifetime of feuding to save their émigré engineer father from voluptuous gold-digger Valentina.