Upton Sinclair meets Joseph Heller, the funniest book since A Confederacy of Dunces. Austin's novel is an unlikely mixture of expose, social satire and high comedy that somehow, brilliantly, succeeds. It will make you laugh, cry, and want to punch out your boss. Don't read this book at work, but by all means read it. Charles Dodt, Author, The Night Boy *** Do you remember the best time of your life? For Chuck Farlowe, his time came and went, one April day back in 1973. His "A" game, unfortunately, was left in the dugout that day. Cut to 1998. His son, Danny, is at the crossroads of his life. A young man in need of answers, he finds them in the form of a long-buried manuscript written by his father back in 1973. Suddenly he finds himself at a strange place and time-the Hotchkis Department Store in downtown Oakland, circa 1970. Danny is introduced to both the store manager, Matt Farber, and the store owner, Isaac Benjamin Stern. Soon a union election begins to loom ominously. Chuck manages to find a kindred spirit in Lee Kroeber, and eventually, after a struggle, with Cooper Smith, whose own bitterness and alienation over store racism threatens to change the entire store dynamic. When Wayne Justice joins the Hotchkis fold in 1971, soon the era of poker and male bonding begin. Rediscovering Mrs. Murphy is all about fighting through the pain of the past and rediscovering what really matters.

The limerick form, we are told, originated with the Greeks. The popular enhancement of the form, however, came about through its extensive usage by English authors.Limericks have been known to come in a number of varieties: risqu, suggestive and perfectly clean but not quite as humorous.The author of this volume of limericks has blended all of these varieties into a collage of social commentary and fancy titillating, all designed to amuse you and hopefully, bring a smile to your cheeks, wherever they are

From the bestselling author of 'Eats, Shoots & Leaves', this is the hilarious new book from Lynne Truss about her strange journey through the world of sport and sports journalism. 'Years ago, Boris Becker famously said, after losing at Wimbledon, "Nobody died. I just lost a tennis match." And while some people applauded him for his healthy sense of proportion, it didn't ring remotely true. While I was writing about sport, I was caught on the horns of this dilemma for the whole bloody time. I was like the poor confused jurors in 'Alice's Adventures in Wonderland' who sit in their jury box, writing emphatically on their little slates, both "important" and "not important" because they honestly don't have a clue.' In this magnificent book, Lynne Truss charts her often bizarre wanderings during her time as a sports journalist for the 'Sunday Times'. From covering a heavyweight world title fight at Madison Square Garden, to watching England beat Holland from an airship above Wembley (while eating chocolate cake); from her extravagant feelings about Andre Agassi, to covering sports like cricket (where, initially, she didn't have any idea what was going on), Lynne Truss manages to crystallize exactly the essence of what sport is about, and bring her characteristic wisdom and wry humour to it. The book will be a revelation to sport's foolish doubters, and a treat for the many of us who spend too much of our time watching it.

Mixing sarcasm and humor with facts and current events, 'Democrats Invade Mars' follows in the footsteps of Stephen Guy Hardin's previous works, 'Commies on Parade' and 'If Being a Conservative Were Easy There Wouldn't Be Any Liberals' as it attempts to peel back yet another layer of the various and nefarious schemes of the American Left and the Democrat Party.

Desperate Times is the unmissable new collection of sketches of contemporary political life by The Times's master of satire, Peter Brookes. Within these pages, the multiple winner of the British Press Awards Cartoonist of the Year showcases the stand-out pieces from his daily cartoons in The Times, up to the minute and breath-taking in their bite and wit. Desperate Times catalogues one of the most eventful years on record with Brooke's usual satire and unsparing critique of political leaders at home and abroad. From Trump to Biden (literally), and from COVID-19 19 to Brexit, this peerless collection of hilarious and beautiful cartoons provides a peerless tonic for these torrid times!

This volume highlights humour's crucial role in shaping historical re-visions of the long nineteenth century, through modes ranging from subtle irony, camp excess, ribald farce, and aesthetic parody to blackly comic narrative games. It analyses neo-Victorian humour's politicisation, its ideological functions and ethical implications across varied media, including fiction, drama, film, webcomics, and fashion. Contemporary humour maps the assumed distance between postmodernity and its targeted nineteenth-century referents only to repeatedly collapse the same in a seemingly self-defeating nihilistic project. This collection explores how neo-Victorian humour generates empathy and effective socio-political critique, dispensing symbolic justice, but also risks recycling the past's invidious ideologies under the politically correct guise of comic debunking, even to the point of negating laughter itself. "This rich and innovative collection invites us to reflect on the complex and various deployments of humour in neo-Victorian texts, where its consumers may wish at times that they could swallow back the laughter a scene or event provokes. It covers a range of approaches to humour utilised by neo-Victorian writers, dramatists, graphic novelists and filmmakers - including the deliberately and pompously unfunny, the traumatic, the absurd, the ribald, and the frankly distasteful - producing a richly satisfying anthology of innovative readings of 'canonical' neo-Victorian texts as well as those which are potential generic outliers. The collection explores what is funny in the neo-Victorian and who we are laughing at - the Victorians, as we like to imagine them, or ourselves, in ways we rarely acknowledge? This is a celebration of the parodic playfulness of a wide range of texts, from fiction to fashion, whilst offering a trenchant critique of the politics of postmodern laughter that will appeal to those working in adaptation studies, gender and queer studies, as well as literary and cultural studies more generally." - Prof. Imelda Whelehan, University of Tasmania, Australia