This book is perfect for people who are funny and for those who aren't funny (thus it is marketable to 100 percent of the population). As we all know, true creativity comes from simple formulas and the memorization of data. This new bible makes the secrets of comedy accessible, not only to those funny few among us, but also to those who might not have the ability or talent to be funny. One no longer need worry about originality -- just find the right comedy number and apply as needed... and then you're on your way to POPULARITYVILLE (c) Comedy by the Numbers is a NEARLY comprehensive list of all comedy characters, bits, scenarios, sketches, skits, shtick, and much more. (We say nearly because we want to leave room for Volume 2.) Included are special hints, tips, and unboring comedy history. Comedy by the Numbers is the brainchild of Prof. Eric Hoffman (Mr. Show) and Dr. Gary Rudoren (Annoyance Theatre) -- AND features loads of comedy fun facts that you can memorize and use to impress people at parties

A compassionate, heartrending memoir of a mother’s quest to accept her son’s journey through psychosis. One night in 2009, Tanya Frank finds her nineteen-year-old son, Zach—gentle and full of promise—in the grip of what the psychiatrists would label a psychotic break. Suddenly and inexplicably, Tanya is thrown into a parallel universe: Zach’s world, where the phones are bugged, his friends have joined the Mafia, and helicopters are spying on his family. In the years following Zach’s shifting psychiatric diagnoses, Tanya goes to war for her son, desperate to find the right answer, the right drug, the right doctor to bring him back to reality. She struggles to navigate archaic mental healthcare systems, first in California and then in her native London during lockdown. Meanwhile, the boy she raised—the chatty, precocious dog-lover, the teenager who spent summers surfing with his big brother, the UCLA student—suffers the effects of multiple hospitalizations, powerful drugs that blunt his emotions, therapies that don’t work, and torturous nights on the streets. Holding on to startling moments of hope and seeking solace in nature and community, Tanya learns how to abandon her fears for the future and accept the mysteries of her son’s altered states. With tenderness, lyricism, and generous candor, this compelling story conveys the power of a mother’s love. Zig-Zag Boy is both a moving lamentation for things lost and a brave testament to the people we become in difficult circumstances.

Literary Nonfiction. Memoir. John Armstrong has worked as a paperboy, a caddy, and a Bible camp counsellor; as a janitor at the Regal Theatre, a shipper of video porn, and a real live punk rock star. As if those jobs weren't punishment enough, at the tender age of thirty he entered the trenches of journalism. "Get up, get dressed so you can hurry to a place you don't want to be, and do things you don't want to do for people you don't like, all for very little money at some far distant point in the future." Armstrong doesn't let it get him down. Whether he's writing about the Bobbsey Twins, a pair of strippers who really love their vegetables, the Golden Road personal fulfillment seminar, where you learn that you choose your own cancer, or the literal bowels of hometown paper the Picayune-Standard, Armstrong simultaneously excoriates and delights. WAGES is a laugh-til-you-cry account of one man's remarkable working life or attempt at a lack thereof. This eccentric, irreverent, and witty chronicle is vintage John Armstrong.

WINNER, NON FICTION BOOK 2023, BOOKS ARE MY BAG AWARDS SHORTLIST, NERO BOOK AWARDS SHORTLIST, BOOKSHOP.ORG INDIE CHAMPIONS SHORTLIST, AMAZON NON-FICTION BOOK OF THE YEAR SHORTLIST, GOODREADS CHOICE BOOK OF THE YEARAudible Books of the Year 2023The Times Books of the Year 2023Apple Best Audiobooks of 2023BOOKSHOP.ORG Book of the Month January 2024THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER 'I tore through this hilarious, smart, sad, revealing book' - Bob Odenkirk 'Funny, sharp and has incredible clarity' - Jon Ronson'An absolute riot. I'm literally going to read it again once I've finished, and I'm a miserable bastard...it's a belter' - FRANKIE BOYLE'Strong Female Character is a testament to the importance of self-knowledge.' - Rachael Healy, The GuardianA summary of my book:1. I'm diagnosed with autism 20 years after telling a doctor I had it.2. My terrible Catholic childhood: I hate my parents etc.3. My friendship with an elderly man who runs the corner shop and is definitely not trying to groom me. I get groomed.4. Homelessness.5. Stripping.6. More stripping but with more nervous breakdowns.7. I hate everyone at uni and live with a psycho etc.8. REDACTED as too spicy.9. After everyone tells me I don't look autistic, I try to cure my autism and get addicted to Xanax.10. REDACTED as too embarrassing.'Fern's book, like everything she does, is awesome. Incredibly funny, and so unapologetically frank that I feel genuinely sorry for her lawyers.' - PHIL WANG'Of course it's funny - it's Fern Brady - but this book is also deeply moving and eye-opening'- ADAM KAY'It made me laugh out loud and broke my heart and made me weep...I hope absolutely everyone reads this, and it makes them kinder and more curious about the way we all live' - DAISY BUCHANAN'Glorious. Frank but nuanced, a memoir that doesn't sacrifice voice or self-awareness. And it has brilliant things to say about being autistic and being funny' - ELLE MCNICOLL'A set text for all of us in 2023' - DEBORAH FRANCES-WHITE'Fern is a brilliant, beautiful writer with a unique voice and even more unique story. Astute, honest and very, very funny.' - LOU SANDERS'So funny and brilliant' - HOLLY SMALE'Witty, dry, and gimlet-eyed, Strong Female Character is a necessary corrective. Brady offers a compelling, messy, highly resonant portrait of what masked Autism feels like.' - Devon Price, author of Unmasking Autism

Author of the acclaimed novel Hurricane Season, Fernanda Melchor leads us into a different kind of hell: paradise Inside a luxury housing complex, two misfit teenagers sneak around and get drunk. Franco Andrade, lonely, overweight, and addicted to porn, obsessively fantasizes about seducing his neighbor—an attractive married woman and mother—while Polo dreams about quitting his grueling job as a gardener within the gated community and fleeing his overbearing mother and their narco-controlled village. Each facing the impossibility of getting what he thinks he deserves, Franco and Polo hatch a mindless and macabre scheme. Written in a chilling torrent of prose by one of our most thrilling new writers, Paradais explores the explosive fragility of Mexican society—with its racist, classist, hyperviolent tendencies—and how the myths, desires, and hardships of teenagers can tear life apart at the seams.

“Like the best noir practitioners, Murphy uses the mystery as scaffolding to assemble a world of fallen dreams and doom-bitten characters . . . Murphy’s hard-boiled rendering of the city is nothing short of exquisite . . . For anyone who wants a portrait of this New York, few recent books have conjured it so vividly.” —The New York Times Book Review, Editors’ Choice• A Best Book of the Year from The New Yorker, LitHub, CrimeReads, and more!A sharp and stylish debut from the editor-in-chief of CrimeReads in which an unwitting private eye gets caught up in a crime of obsession between a reclusive literary superstar and her bookseller husband, paying homage to the noir genre just as smartly as it reinvents itAfter leaving behind the comforts and the shackles of a prestigious law firm, a restless attorney makes ends meet in mid-2000s Brooklyn by picking up odd jobs from a colorful assortment of clients. When a mysterious woman named Anna Reddick turns up at his apartment with ten thousand dollars in cash and asks him to track down her missing husband Newton, an antiquarian bookseller who she believes has been pilfering rare true crime volumes from her collection, he trusts it will be a quick and easy case. But when the real Anna Reddick—a magnetic but unpredictable literary prodigy—lands on his doorstep with a few bones to pick, he finds himself out of his depth, drawn into a series of deceptions involving Joseph Conrad novels, unscrupulous booksellers, aspiring flâneurs, and seedy real estate developers. Set against the backdrop of New York at the tail end of the analog era and immersed in the worlds of literature and bookselling, An Honest Living is a gripping story of artistic ambition, obsession, and the small crimes we commit against one another every day.

Journalist, presenter, broadcaster, husband, father, vigorous all-rounder: Alan Partridge. Star of action blockbuster Alpha Papa; a man with a fascinating past and an amazing future. I Partridge: We Need To Talk About Alan is the memoir of Alan Partridge, the nation’s favourite broadcaster. It is a work of heart-breaking majesty. Genuinely one of the best books of the last fifteen to twenty years, I, Partridge charts the highs, lows and middle bits in the life of one of Europe’s most revered inquisitors.

In At Home, Bill Bryson applies the same irrepressible curiosity, irresistible wit, stylish prose and masterful storytelling that made A Short History of Nearly Everything one of the most lauded books of the last decade, and delivers one of the most entertaining and illuminating books ever written about the history of the way we live. Bill Bryson was struck one day by the thought that we devote a lot more time to studying the battles and wars of history than to considering what history really consists of: centuries of people quietly going about their daily business - eating, sleeping and merely endeavouring to get more comfortable. And that most of the key discoveries for humankind can be found in the very fabric of the houses in which we live.This inspired him to start a journey around his own house, an old rectory in Norfolk, wandering from room to room considering how the ordinary things in life came to be. Along the way he did a prodigious amount of research on the history of anything and everything, from architecture to electricity, from food preservation to epidemics, from the spice trade to the Eiffel Tower, from crinolines to toilets; and on the brilliant, creative and often eccentric minds behind them. And he discovered that, although there may seem to be nothing as unremarkable as our domestic lives, there is a huge amount of history, interest and excitement - and even a little danger - lurking in the corners of every home.

Robert Evans' The Kid Stays in the Picture is universally recognized as the greatest, most outrageous, and most unforgettable show business memoir ever written. The basis of an award-winning documentary film, it remains the gold standard of Hollywood storytelling. With black-and-white photographs from the author's archive and a new introduction by the legendary actor, producer, and Hollywood studio chief Robert Evans, The Kid Stays in the Picture is driven by a voice as charming and irresistible as any great novel. An extraordinary raconteur, Evans spares no one, least of all himself. Filled with starring roles for everyone from Ava Gardner to Marlon Brando to Sharon Stone, The Kid Stays in the Picture: A Notorious Life is sharp, witty, and self-aggrandizing, and self-lacerating in equal measure.This is a must-read for fans of American cinema and classics of the canon, including The Odd Couple, Rosemary's Baby, Love Story, The Godfather, and Chinatown.

An exhilarating, brutal, comedic masterpiece—an American classic that will “leave you so giddy you’ll go and kick sand in somebody’s face” (Houston Post) When My Search for Warren Harding, Robert Plunket’s glittering story of literary sleuthing and deceit, first appeared in 1983, it garnered immediate and far-reaching acclaim. Frank Conroy at the Washington Post exclaimed, “The author pulled me in so deftly, moved me up an escalating scale of sly hyperbole so cunningly, that after a hundred pages, I seemed to have turned over the keys, so to speak, of my nervous system”; Florence King at the Dallas Times Herald, “The most exciting event in American letters for a very long time: a momentous book.” More recently, though long out of print, it was canonized in The Guardian’s “1000 Novels Everyone Must Read,” ranked by the Washington Post as one of the top five books of “great American comic fiction,” and praised by Michael Leone in the Los Angeles Review of Books as “a classic picaresque novel in the tradition of Cervantes.” Set against the fading light of early-1980s Hollywood, our deeply flawed, bigoted, closeted antihero Elliot Weiner is a historian—Harvard BA, Columbia PhD—with a passion for Morris dancing and Warren Harding, “the shallowest President in history.” After Weiner receives a research grant to write a book on the tumultuous life of Harding, he gets wind of a trunkful of the 29th president’s bawdy billets-doux that is rumored to be fiercely guarded by his ancient mistress Rebekah Kinney on her declining Hollywood Hills estate. Nothing and no one can stand in the way of Weiner getting his paws on the treasure, and along the way, as the words dance across the page, a hysterical, guffaw-inducing punchline around every corner, Weiner reaches new lows of humiliation and self-delusion.

On the Road swings to the rhythms of 1950s underground America, jazz, sex, generosity, chill dawns and drugs, with Sal Paradise and his hero Dean Moriarty, traveller and mystic, the living epitome of Beat. Now recognized as a modern classic, its American Dream is nearer that of Walt Whitman than Scott Fitzgerald, and it goes racing towards the sunset with unforgettable exuberance, poignancy and autobiographical passion.Contains an introduction by Ann Charters, as well as suggestions for further reading of acclaimed criticisms and references.

WINNER OF THE NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE "A brilliant literary murder mystery." —Chicago Tribune "Extraordinary. Tokarczuk's novel is funny, vivid, dangerous, and disturbing, and it raises some fierce questions about human behavior. My sincere admiration for her brilliant work." —Annie ProulxIn a remote Polish village, Janina devotes the dark winter days to studying astrology, translating the poetry of William Blake, and taking care of the summer homes of wealthy Warsaw residents. Her reputation as a crank and a recluse is amplified by her not-so-secret preference for the company of animals over humans. Then a neighbor, Big Foot, turns up dead. Soon other bodies are discovered, in increasingly strange circumstances. As suspicions mount, Janina inserts herself into the investigation, certain that she knows whodunit. If only anyone would pay her mind . . .A deeply satisfying thriller cum fairy tale, Drive Your Plow over the Bones of the Dead is a provocative exploration of the murky borderland between sanity and madness, justice and tradition, autonomy and fate. Whom do we deem sane? it asks. Who is worthy of a voice?