Crusoe Larkin is a private investigator in a place that doesn't really seem to need one: Woodstock, New York. It's an easygoing little town with a big and famous reputation, full of old hippies, young hipsters, Buddhists, tourists and folks who like to look up at mountains or look down from them. It's a pretty view either way. Being underbusy suits Larkin just fine -- in fact, he doesn't even have an office: the few potential clients who might need his services despite his wiseass attitude...

You may fear the Reaper, but these laugh-filled essays, articles, sketches and lists make the dude seem a lot less Grim. From the 33 stages of dying to a fairly deep (actually, shallow) discussion of death symbolism in dreams, and even exercises for the dead (including the ever-popular Lying in Place), you'll want to make sure to live long enough to read them all.

Take a seat and settle in—it's a gigantic treasury of trivia and humor for our twenty-fifth (is that porcelain?) anniversary!IBPA Benjamin Franklin Award Gold Winner in HumorForeWord Reviews Book of the Year Awards, Honorable Mention in Humor"Fully Loaded" is putting it mildly. This behemoth of a book is overflowing with incredible stories, surprising facts, weird news, little-known origins, forgotten history, fun wordplay, and ever...

From This American Life alum David Rakoff comes a hilarious collection that single-handedly raises self-deprecation to an art form. Whether impersonating Sigmund Freud in a department store window during the holidays, climbing an icy mountain in cheap loafers, or learning primitive survival skills in the wilds of New Jersey, Rakoff clearly demonstrates how he doesn’t belong–nor does he try to.In his debut collection of essays, Rakoff uses his razor-sharp wit and snarky hum...

Capturing the essence of Hunter S. Thompson’s “Gonzo” style, short story Mescalito details his dark and miserably comic first mescaline drug trip. First published in Songs of the Doomed, Mescalito suggests the nascent ideas and energy of Thompson’s seminal work on the ‘60s experience, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas."We live in a jungle of pending disasters," the author warns. Alone in a hotel room in Los Angeles in February, 1969, Thompso...

It's here! The 23rd annual edition in the popular Uncle John's Bathroom Reader series.The big brains at the Bathroom Readers’ Institute have come up with 544 all-new pages full of incredible facts, hilarious articles, and a whole bunch of other ways to, er, pass the time. With topics ranging from history and science to pop culture, wordplay, and modern mythology, Heavy Duty is sure to amaze and entertain the loyal legions of throne sitters. Read about…...

When Harold Ross founded The New Yorker in 1925, he described it as a “comic weekly.” And although it has become much more than that, it has remained true in its irreverent heart to the founder’s description, publishing the most illustrious literary humorists of the modern era—among them Robert Benchley, Dorothy Parker, Groucho Marx, George S. Kaufman, James Thurber, S. J. Perelman, Peter De Vries, Mike Nichols, Marshall Brickman, Woody Allen, Donald Barthelme, Calvin Trillin, Geo...

The perfect gag gift that blends absurdity, wit, and pop culture in a collection of laugh-out-loud funny and irresistibly thought-provoking dilemmas.Within these pages are over 200 hilarious questions that ask readers to look deep inside themselves and choose between two equally undesirable—or desirable—options. Prepare to be stumped by quandaries like:• Would you rather watch a porn movie with your parents, or watch a porn movie starring your parents?

The debut collection of a poet whose savage, hilarious work has already received extraordinary notice.Since his poems first began to appear in the pages of The New Yorker and Poetry, there has been a lot of excited talk about the fresh and inventive work of Michael Robbins. Equal parts hip- hop, John Berryman, and capitalism seeking death and not finding it, Robbins's poems are strange, wonderful, wild, and completely unlike anything else being wr...

“The Walt Whitman of Los Angeles.”—Joyce Carol Oates“He brought everybody down to earth, even the angels.”—Leonard Cohen, songwriterArguably the most imitated and influential American poet of the previous half-century, Charles Bukowski remains a counter-culture icon more than a decade after his death. The Continual Condition is a collection of never-before-published poems by the inimitable Bukowski—raw, tough, odes to alcohol, women, work, and despair by a r...

Some jobs are dirty. Some jobs are easy. But in Hows Business? 101 Hilarious Jokes That Work For Kids - Clever Jokes That Will Have You Laughing Out Loud About Funny Jobs and Careers all the jobs are funny! You'll laugh out loud when you find out how these new business are going. The elevator business has its ups and downs. Repairing chairs? It'll keep you on the edge of your seat! These clever and unexpected twists will have you looking at work in a newhilariousway!

A NEW YORK REVIEW E-BOOK ORIGINALAs former U.S. poet laureate Charles Simic has said, the secret to our identities lies not in grand events, but in the parentheses between events--and in these brief essays, we get a taste of this great poet's parenthetical observations and recollections. He takes us from his rattling house on a stormy New Hampshire night, to a park bench in Washington Square where two old men sitdiscussing the women they've known, to a business convention in ...