In the great wandering tradition of Bill Bryson, Louis Theroux and Jon Ronson, journalist Mark Haskell Smith strips down the world of social nudism in a hilarious, wildly entertaining and profoundly enlightening book about those who renounce clothing and embrace what lies beneath.Naked at Lunch is one man's cracklingly witty, compellingly odd and oddly life-affirming journey into the subculture of nudism. Celebrated journalist Mark Haskell Smith meets, and...

When the greedy owner of a Las Vegas movie catering company tries to muscle in on a local, family-owned business in Honolulu, it leaves a very bad taste in the mouths of the natives, and the battle for paradise begins for Joseph, a young Hawaiian chef. As far as Joseph's father Sid is concerned, this is an invasion on par with Captain Cook and the mainlanders have to be stopped at all costs. As Joseph defends his family he encounters a TV producer rebounding from a bad breakup and sufferin...

"Rude Talk in Athens is brave, brilliant, and incredibly funny. There are loads of very specific characters, including Mark himself. It's the Mark Haskell Smith version of hanging out with Stanley Tucci and Anthony Bourdain, but in present day and ancient Greece. I agree with everything he says about comedy and have never read anything like it." ―Barry Sonnenfeld, Film Director and author of Barry Sonnenfeld, Call Your Mother: Memoirs of a Neurotic Filmmaker

A Los Angeles slacker becomes apprentice to a crime lord in this "dark and mordantly funny" rampage through the gutters of La La Land (T. C. Boyle).What could cause Bob to give up his cushy job at a pathology lab where he can play Tetris and surf the Web whenever he wants? Why on earth would he walk out on his beautiful girlfriend, a professional masturbation coach? What could induce him to risk his life by masquerading as a kingpin in the Los Angeles Mexican mafia...

This tale of a pot grower in peril is "as cockeyed and riotous as Carl Hiaasen on really good dope" ( Kirkus Reviews).Miro Basinas is an experimental botanist who sells his rarefied product to a discerning clientele. Only Miro is not growing heirloom tomatoes or making organic wine—he's growing weed. And when Miro hits the big time by winning Amsterdam's famed Cannabis Cup, cannasseurs and ganjaficionados aren't the only...

What could cause Bob to give up his job at the Los Angeles pathology lab that demands so little of him, where he can play Tetris and Web surf whenever he wants? What could lead him to walk out on his beautiful girlfriend, who makes her living as a masturbation coach? What could make him risk everything and ultimately transform him into Roberto, a kingpin in the Los Angeles Mexican mafia? An erotic tattoo. But not just any naughty skin ink, the Mona Lisa of erotic tattoos, painted on a seve...

Reporting for the Los Angeles Times on the international blind tasting competition held annually in Amsterdam known as the Cannabis Cup*,* novelist Mark Haskell Smith sampled a variety of marijuana that was unlike anything he’d experienced. It wasn’t anything like typical stoner weed, in fact it didn’t get you stoned. This cannabis possessed an ephemeral quality known to aficionados as “dankness.”Armed with a State of California Medical Marijuana recommendation, he begins ...

Sepp Gregory, a reality-TV hunk and one of People magazine's "sexiest men alive," is on tour to promote his debut novel. Not that Sepp's actually read the book-he doesn't have to, he lived it! And everyone just wants him to take his shirt off. The book has hit the bestseller list and is even getting rave reviews from serious critics. Aside from Harriet Post, that is. One of the blogosphere's most respected literary minds, Harriet fears that the novel's reception means the end of civilizati...

Bryan LeBlanc worked his way up into a plum position on Wall Street as the boy genius of the foreign exchange desk. Surrounded by acolytes of the free market, the true believers, the U.S. Marines of capitalism?"the few, the proud, the completely full of themselves"?Bryan soon realizes that being honest at a dishonest job is not the path to success. He decides to give Wall Street a taste of its own medicine and hatches an intricate plan to disappear permanently with just enough misappropria...

In ancient Athens, thousands would attend theatre festivals that turned writing into a fierce battle for fame, money, and laughably large trophies. While the tragedies earned artistic respect, it was the comedies—the raunchy jokes, vulgar innuendo, outrageous invention, and barbed political commentary—that captured the imagination of the city.The writers of these comedic plays feuded openly, insulting one another from the stage, each production more inventive and outlandish than th...

This uproarious collection pokes fun at the unfairer sex with 300 hilarious jokes and put-downs. Volume I of Jim Mullen's hilarious series.

"If Raymond Chandler were reincarnated as a novelist in south Florida, he couldn't nail it any better than John Dufresne."—Carl HiaasenJohn Dufresne has been hailed by the New York Times as "an original talent . . . [whose] humor is frightfully dark, but . . . dazzling." I Don't Like Where This Is Going continues the misadventures of therapist-on-the-run Wylie "Coyote" Melville. Wylie has witnessed a woman falling to her death outside the Luxor Ho...