Funniest Works of Fiction Part 1
Discover the funniest works of fiction ever written in this curated list, from Catch-22 and The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy to Ulysses and The Princess Bride—a hilarious literary tour through satire, wit, and absurdity.
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The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
by Douglas Adams
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • “Extremely funny . . . inspired lunacy . . . [and] over much too soon.”—The Washington Post Book World SOON TO BE A HULU SERIES • Now celebrating the pivotal 42nd anniversary of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy! Nominated as one of America’s best-loved novels by PBS’s The Great American Read It’s an ordinary Thursday morning for Arthur Dent . . . until his house gets demolished. The Earth follows shortly after to make way for a new hyperspace express route, and Arthur’s best friend has just announced that he’s an alien. After that, things get much, much worse. With just a towel, a small yellow fish, and a book, Arthur has to navigate through a very hostile universe in the company of a gang of unreliable aliens. Luckily the fish is quite good at languages. And the book is The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy . . . which helpfully has the words DON’T PANIC inscribed in large, friendly letters on its cover. Douglas Adams’s mega-selling pop-culture classic sends logic into orbit, plays havoc with both time and physics, offers up pithy commentary on such things as ballpoint pens, potted plants, and digital watches . . . and, most important, reveals the ultimate answer to life, the universe, and everything. Now, if you could only figure out the question. . . .
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Reservation Blues
by Sherman Alexie
When Robert Johnson passes his enchanted guitar to Thomas-Builds-the-Fire, an epic journey of redemption begins that will take the storyteller and musician from the reservation, to Seattle, to Manhattan, and all points in between. Reader's Guide included. Reprint.
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Money
by Martin Amis
John Self, one of London's top directors of commercials, is in New York making his first feature film. He is also spending money on drink, dope, sex, fast food, and love. After several weeks of major degeneracy, he retreats to London, only to confront new temptations and new terrors.
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Human Croquet
by Kate Atkinson
Once part of a vast expanse where a wealthy Elizabethan family settled and built Fairfax Manor, by the mid-1960s the village of Lythe has become a disintegrated forest where the destroyed, dysfunctional Fairfax family continues to crumble.
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Behind the Scenes at the Museum
by Kate Atkinson
Ruby Lennox was conceived grudgingly by Bunty and born while her father, George, was in the Dog and Hare in Doncaster telling a woman in an emerald dress and a D-cup that he wasn't married. Bunty had never wanted to marry George, but here she was, stock in a flat above the pet shop in an ancient street beneath York Minster, with sensible and sardonic Patricia aged five, greedy cross-patch Gillian who refused to be ignored, and Ruby. Ruby tells the story of The Family, from the day at the end of the nineteenth century when a travelling French photographer catches frail beautiful Alice and her children, like flowers in amber, to the startling, witty, and memorable events of Ruby's own life.
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The Sot-weed Factor
by John Barth
A parody of life in colonial America relates the adventures of Ebenezer Cooke who became the poet laureate of Maryland.
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Sixty Stories
by Donald Barthelme
This excellent collection of Donald Barthelme's literary output during the 1960s and 1970s covers the period when the writer came to prominence--producing the stories, satires, parodies, and other formal experiments that altered fiction as we know it--and wrote many of the most beautiful sentences in the English language. Due to the unfortunate discontinuance of many of Barthelme's titles, 60 Stories now stands as one of the broadest overviews of his work, containing selections from eight previously published books, as well as a number of other short works that had been otherwise uncollected.
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Watt
by Samuel Beckett
"An account of the grotesque and improbable adventures of a fantastically logical Irish servant and his master, narrated with mordant wit and rooted in Beckett's own terrifying vision of despair"--Cover.
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Zuleika Dobson
by Max Beerbohm
Beerbohm's satire of undergraduate life at Oxford, "Zuleika Dobson", first published in 1911, is a classic work whose neglect is sure to remedied by this republication in the Modern Library.
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Woodcutters
by Thomas Bernhard
This controversial portrayal of Viennese artistic circles begins as the writer-narrator arrives at an 'artistic dinner' given by a composer and his society wife--a couple that the writer once admired and has come to loathe. The guest of honor, an actor from the Burgtheater, is late. As the other guests wait impatiently, they are seen through the critical eye of the narrator, who begins a silent but frenzied, sometimes maniacal, and often ambivalent tirade against these former friends, most of whom were brought together by the woman whom they had buried that day. Reflections on Joana's life and suicide are mixed with these denunciations until the famous actor arrives, bringing a culmination to the evening for which the narrator had not even thought to hope. "Mr. Bernhard's portrait of a society in dissolution has a Scandinavian darkness reminiscent of Ibsen and Strindberg, but it is filtered through a minimalist prose. . . . Woodcutters offers an unusually intense, engrossing literary experience."--Mark Anderson, New York Times Book Review "Musical, dramatic and set in Vienna, Woodcutters. . . .resembles a Strauss operetta with a libretto by Beckett."--Joseph Costes, Chicago Tribune "Thomas Bernhard, the great pessimist-rhapsodist of German literature . . . never compromises, never makes peace with life. . . . Only in the pure, fierce isolation of his art can he get justice."--Michael Feingold, Village Voice "In typical Bernhardian fashion the narrator is moved by hatred and affection for a society that he believes destroys the very artistic genius it purports to glorify. A superb translation."--Library Journal
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Killoyle
by Roger Boylan
An Irish farce on the inhabitants of a provincial town. They include a poet who is working as a headwaiter, a former pin-up girl who is a magazine editor, and a man who only reads books about God and who makes anonymous phone calls to convince people to believe in God. A first novel.
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Naked Lunch
by William S. Burroughs
Since its original publication in Paris in 1959, Naked Lunch has become one of the most important novels of the twentieth century. Exerting its influence on the relationship of art and obscenity, it is one of the books that redefined not just literature but American culture. For the Burroughs enthusiast and the neophyte, this volume—that contains final-draft typescripts, numerous unpublished contemporaneous writings by Burroughs, his own later introductions to the book, and his essay on psychoactive drugs—is a valuable and fresh experience of a novel that has lost none of its relevance or satirical bite.
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Cosmicomics
by Italo Calvino
Enchanting stories about the evolution of the universe, with characters that are fashioned from mathematical formulae and cellular structures. “Naturally, we were all there, - old Qfwfq said, - where else could we have been? Nobody knew then that there could be space. Or time either: what use did we have for time, packed in there like sardines?” Translated by William Weaver. A Helen and Kurt Wolff Book
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Tower of Babel
by Elias Canetti
Auto-da-Fé, Elias Canetti's only work of fiction, is a staggering achievement that puts him squarely in the ranks of major European writers such as Robert Musil and Hermann Broch. It is the story of Peter Kien, a scholarly recluse who lives among and for his great library. The destruction of Kien through the instrument of the illiterate, brutish housekeeper he marries constitutes the plot of the book. The best writers of our time have been concerned with the horror of the modern world--one thinks of Kafka, to whom Canetti has often been compared. But Auto-da-Fé stands as a completely original, unforgettable treatment of the modern predicament.
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The Full Catastrophe
by David Carkeet
Jeremy Cook, introduced in Double Negative, has just taken a new job with an unusual counseling firm. His assignment is to live with a couple and analyze their interactions. The hidden innuendos that surface bring about hilarious complications, and the result is a howling look at marriage in all its catastrophic permutations.
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Tempest-tost
by Robertson Davies
A novel about an amateur teatrical group and its performance of The Tempest.
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Jacques the Fatalist and His Master
by Denis Diderot
'Your Jacques is a tasteless mishmash of things that happen, some of them true, others made up, written without style and served up like a dog's breakfast.' Jacques the Fatalist is Diderot's answer to the problem of existence. If human beings are determined by their genes and their environment, how can they claim to be free to want or do anything? Where are Jacques and his Master going? Are they simply occupying space, living mechanically until they die, believing erroneously that they are in charge of their Destiny? Diderot intervenes to cheat our expectations of what fiction should be and do, and behaves like a provocative, ironic and unfailingly entertaining master of revels who finally show why Fate is not to be equated with doom. In the introduction to this brilliant new translation, David Coward explains the philosophical basis of Diderot's fascination with Fate and shows why Jacques the Fatalist pioneers techniques of fiction which, two centuries on, novelists still regard as experimental.
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The Ginger Man
by James Patrick Donleavy
First published in 1955 and originally banned in America, this reprint is part of a series of reissues of works by this incomparable author, whom Joseph Heller has called "one of the most accomplished and original writers of our time."
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The River why
by David James Duncan
Since its publication by Sierra Club Books nearly two decades ago, The River Why has become a classic, standing with Norman Maclean's A River Runs Through It as the most-read fiction about fly-fishing of our era. Duncan's protagonist, Gus Orviston, is an irreverent young flyfisherman--a vibrant character who makes us laugh easily and feel deeply, and who speaks with startling truth about the way we live. Leaving behind a madcap, fishing-obsessed family, Gus embarks on an extraordinary voyage of self-discovery along his beloved Oregon rivers. What he unexpectedly finds is man's wanton destruction of nature and a burning desire to commit himself to its preservation. The River Why is a tale that gives a contemporary voice to the concerns and hopes of all living things on this beautiful, watery planet. It is the story of one man's search for meaning, for love, and for a sane way to live.
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Walking Across Egypt
by Clyde Edgerton
She has as much business keeping a stray dog as she would walking across Egypt–which not so incidentally is the title of her favorite hymn. She’s Mattie Rigsbee, an independent, strong-minded senior citizen who, at seventy-eight, might be slowing down just a bit. When teenage delinquent Wesley Benfield drops in on her life, he is even less likely a companion than the stray dog. But, of course, the dog never tasted her mouth-watering pound cake. Wise and witty, down-home and real, Walking Across Egypt is a book for everyone.
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The Franchiser
by Stanley Elkin
"Sentence for sentence, nobody in America writes better than Stanley Elkin." The New Republic
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Otherwise Engaged
by Suzanne Brockmann
Praised for her breezy and charming style, Brockmann entangles an eligible bachelor and a pretty widow in a charade of love. But while pretending they're engaged so he can fend off unwanted advances, he finds that he wants to get married after all--to her.
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Bouvard and Pecuchet
by Gustave Flaubert
Bouvard and Pécuchet are two Chaplinesque copy-clerks who meet on a park bench in Paris. Following an unexpected inheritance, they decide to give up their jobs and explore the world of ideas. In this, his last novel, unfinished on his death in 1880, Flaubert attempted to encompass his lifelong preoccupation with bourgeois stupidity and his disgust at the banalities of intellectual life in France. Into it he poured all his love of detail, his delight in the life of the mind, his despair of human nature, and his pleasure in passionate friendship. The result is “a kind of encyclopedia made into farce,” wholly grotesque and wholly original, in the spirit of Gargantua and Pantagruel, Don Quixote or Ulysses.
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The Princess Bride
by William Goldman
Now a cult classic, this story of pirates, evil princes, sorcerers, and, most importantly, true love is handsomely repackaged in a commemorative 25th anniversary hardcover. Copyright © Libri GmbH. All rights reserved.
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Second Skin
by John Hawkes
"John Hawkes is an extraordinary writer. I have always admired his books. They should be more widely read."--Saul Bellow
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Catch-22
by Joseph Heller
Catch-22 is like no other novel. It is one of the funniest books ever written, a keystone work in American literature, and even added a new term to the dictionary. At the heart of Catch-22 resides the incomparable, malingering bombardier, Yossarian, a hero endlessly inventive in his schemes to save his skin from the horrible chances of war. His efforts are perfectly understandable because as he furiously scrambles, thousands of people he hasn't even met are trying to kill him. His problem is Colonel Cathcart, who keeps raising the number of missions the men must fly to complete their service. Yet if Yossarian makes any attempts to excuse himself from the perilous missions that he is committed to flying, he is trapped by the Great Loyalty Oath Crusade, the hilariously sinister bureaucratic rule from which the book takes its title: a man is considered insane if he willingly continues to fly dangerous combat missions, but if he makes the necessary formal request to be relieved of such missions, the very act of making the request proves that he is sane and therefore ineligible to be relieved. Catch-22 is a microcosm of the twentieth-century world as it might look to some one dangerously sane -- a masterpiece of our time.
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House Mother Normal
by B. S. Johnson
"Shares the thoughts and memories of eight elderly men and women living in a nursing home." -- Amazon.com viewed November 25, 2020.
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Ulysses
by James Joyce
This revised volume of the acclaimed novel follows the complete unabridged text as corrected in 1961. Set entirely on one day, 16 June 1904, Ulysses follows Leopold Bloom and Stephen Daedalus as they go about their daily business in Dublin. From this starting point, James Joyce constructs a novel of extraordinary imaginative richness and depth. Unique in the history of literature, Ulysses is one of the most important and enjoyable works of the twentieth century. This edition contains the original foreword by the author and the historic court ruling to remove the federal ban. It also contains page references to the first American edition of 1934.
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The Trial
by Franz Kafka
A brilliant translation of one of the most important novels of the twentieth century, revealing a tale that is as full of energy and power as it was when it was first written. From the author of The Metamorphosis. Written in 1914, The Trial is the terrifying tale of Josef K., a respectable bank officer who is suddenly and inexplicably arrested and must defend himself against a charge about which he can get no information. Whether read as an existential tale, a parable, or a prophecy of the excesses of modern bureaucracy wedded to the madness of totalitarianism, Kafka's nightmare has resonated with chilling truth for generations of readers. This new edition is based upon the work of an international team of experts who have restored the text, the sequence of chapters, and their division to create a version that is as close as possible to the way the author left it.
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Diminished Capacity
by Sherwood Kiraly
The hilarious story of a zany mid-western outcast, his well-meaning but forgetful nephew, and the baseball card that could make them both rich.
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The Bear Went Over the Mountain
by William Kotzwinkle
The rise to literary fame of a bear which steals the manuscript of a writer and offers it for sale as its own. The novel describes the manner in which the manuscript becomes a bestseller and the bear a famous author. A lampoon on the publishing industry.