Humour Short

The British, it is often said, have a stiff upper lip and a dry sense of humour. It's true, we usually do, and in the case of this perfect compendium of short stories we absolutely do. Listen to our Scottish raconteur J. M. Barrie and English wits Jerome K. Jerome and Edward Lear for perfect proof of that. But humour is many things and from many places, so we also feature Mark Twain, our very talented American friend, to complete this rather witty and clever volume of short stories.

Eighteen of the very best American short stories, each a classic in its own right. Stories include "The Little Frenchman and his Water Lots", by George Pope Morris; "The Angel of the Odd", by Edgar Allan Poe; "The Schoolmasters’s Progress", by Caroline M.S. Kirkland; "The Watkinson Evening", by Eliza Leslie; "Titbottom’s Spectacles", by George William Curtis; "My Double and "How He Undid Me", by Edward Everett Hale; "A Visit to the Asylum for Aged and Decayed Punsters", by Oliver Wendell; and more.

Death might seem to render pointless all our attempts to create a meaningful life. Doesn't meaning require transcending death through an afterlife or in some other way? On the contrary, Dean Rickles argues, life without death would be like playing tennis without a net. Only constraints—and death is the ultimate constraint—make our actions meaningful. In Life Is Short, Rickles explains why the finiteness and shortness of life is the essence of its meaning-and how this insight is the key to making the most of the time we do have.

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.

This audiobook contains an introductory section exclusively about the author, his brief life sketch, notable works and achievements along with word meanings of difficult words marked and highlighted in the accompanying PDF for the listeners' convenience and easy understanding of the story.

Motherhood has turned out to be a lot weirder and lonelier than Mary anticipated - has the world gone crazy, or has she? Most of the time, it feels like both. But when her oldest starts kindergarten, Mary meets another mom, Fiona, and the two form an unusual yet exhilarating friendship. There’s only one problem: Mary doesn’t really like Fiona’s husband, Andreas. What begins as a minor irritation keeps intensifying and changing shape in Mary’s mind as Andreas’s perceived wrongdoings pile up, until she can’t distinguish integrity from self-sabotage.

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.

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.

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.

Fay Weldon CBE was an award-winning author and self-declared feminist. Weldon's work features what she described as "overweight, plain women" – as she deliberately sought, she said, to write about and give a voice to women who are often overlooked or not featured in the media. She said there...

In questa novella Pirandello ci presenta Aurelio, un anziano che ha condotto una vita molto sfortunata, tanto da sembrare una caricatura del Giobbe biblico. Privato di tutto, passa ormai le giornate visitando le chiese di Roma. Durante una delle sue visite però si appisolerà e farà un sogno molto strano...

Pubblicata per la prima volta su Rassegna Contemporanea nell'agosto del 1911, "I fortunati" è una novella in cui Pirandello critica in maniera molto dura il mondo della chiesa, senza per questo rinunciare alla sua tagliente ironia. Conosciamo così Don Arturo Filomarino, giovane prete del piccolo paesino di Montelusa (paesino immaginario che, molto probabilmente, è Girgenti), che deve fare i conti con una pesantissima eredità.

Perché un paladino in copertina? Certamente perché il racconto, intrigante e pieno di atmosfera, è ambientato in Sicilia - ma tranquilli, di dialetto ce n'è poco. Quanto basta, "come il sale", secondo una lettrice di Parma. Ma c'è un secondo motivo. In tutti i racconti tratti da "Pilipintò - Racconti da bagno per Siciliani e non", come questo "Il conferenziere" che state per ascoltare dalla mia voce, troverete trame e capovolgimenti di prospettiva.

Brought to you by Penguin. Say 'philosopher,' and someone grand, old and bearded might come to mind. But, as philosophy professor Scott Hershovitz shows in this delightful debut, some of the best philosophers in the world are better described as nasty, brutish and short--that is to say, they're...

A classic of travel writing, ‘A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush’ is Eric Newby’s iconic account of his journey through one of the most remote and beautiful wildernesses on earth. It was 1956, and Eric Newby was earning an improbable living in the chaotic family business of London haute...

This selection of hilarious short stories takes the habitually clueless Bertie Wooster to New York. Thankfully, his faithful butler, Jeeves, is along to straighten out the wickets when they get a bit sticky, don't you know. Selections include "Leave It To Jeeves", "Extricating Young Gussie", "Jeeves Takes Charge", "Jeeves and the Hard-Boiled Egg", "Jeeves and the Unbidden Guest", "Jeeves and the Chump Cyril", and "The Aunt and the Sluggard".

Bloomsbury presents Today a Woman Went Mad in the Supermarket by Hilma Wolitzer, read by Hilary Huber. A TIME 'New Books You Should Read' A People magazine 'Book of the Week' A New York Times Editors' Choice With a foreword by Elizabeth Strout ‘Electric: with wit, with rage, with grief, with...

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".

A full-frontal confrontation of the ways we perform desire and shame—from the downright bizarre to the frighteningly relatable—by the award-winning author of A Sharp Endless Need “Funny and bleak like a queer George Saunders, these stories weird up daily life . . . I love this book...

An NPR Best Book of 2022 * One of Christian Science Monitor's 10 best books of May “This amazing new book . . . takes us on a journey through classic and contemporary philosophy powered by questions like ‘What do we have the right to do? When is it okay to do this or that?’ They explore...