Humorous fiction

Ray in Reverse

By Daniel Wallace

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"Sitting in Last Words group where everyone is recounting their last words on earth, Ray is embarrassed. He didn't declare his love. He didn't say anything symbolic. He didn't reveal his benevolence or goodwill. In fact, he didn't even finish his sentence. His words didn't measure up, and now he can't seem to get them out of his head. Now, in Heaven, he has time to reflect on his short life of fifty years. This is the darkly humorous story of that life, told backward."
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Fluke, or I know Why the Winged Whale Sings

By Christopher Moore

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"Just why do humpback whales sing? That's the question that has marine behavioral biologist Nate Quinn and his crew poking, charting, recording, and photographing very big, wet, gray marine mammals. Until the extraordinary day when a whale lifts its tail into the air to display a cryptic message spelled out in foot-high letters: Bite me. Trouble is, Nate's beginning to wonder if he hasn't spent just a little too much time in the sun. 'Cause no one else on his team saw a thing, not his longtime partner, Clay Demodocus; not their saucy young research assistant; not even the spliff-puffing white-boy Rastaman Kona (ne Preston Applebaum). But later, when a roll of film returns from the lab missing the crucial tail shot, and his research facility is trashed, Nate realizes something very fishy indeed is going on."
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Parlor Games

By Mavis Cheek

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"Celia - housewife, mother, wonderful cook - lives in Bedford Park, London, where the major worries are dailies, private schooling and the misplaced zeal of neighbourhood watch vigilantes. She is celebrating her 40th birthday. The armpit of the English bourgeoisie never felt snugger."
(Known in the U.K. as Parlour Games)

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Cold Comfort Farm

By Stella Gibbons

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When a well-educated young socialite in 1930s England is left orphaned and unable to support herself at age twenty-two, she moves in with her eccentric relatives on their farm.

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Wanda Hickey's Night of Golden Memories, and Other Disasters

By Jean Shepherd

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The creator of A Christmas Story shares more of growing up in the Midwest--this time during his teenaged years:
"...a universal (and achingly funny) orchestration of Midwestern puberty rites, from the gut-wrenching playground antics of one Delbert Bumpus, to the supernal glow surrounding unapproachable high school beauty Daphne Bigelow, to the memorable disaster that was Shepherd's (and everyone else's) junior prom."
Stories include:
The grandstand passion play of Delbert and the Bumpus hounds --County fair! -- Scut Farkas and the murderous Mariah -- Ollie Hopnoodle's haven of bliss -- The star-crossed romance of Josephine Cosnowski --Daphne Bigelow and the spine-chilling saga of the snail-encrusted tinfoil noose - - The return of the smiling Wimpy doll -- Wanda Hickey's night of golden memories.

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The Hotel du Lac

By Anita Brookner

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"...tells the story of Edith Hope, who writes romance novels under a pseudonym. When her life begins to resemble the plots of her own novels, however, Edith flees to Switzerland, where the quiet luxury of the Hotel du Lac promises to resore her to her senses. But instead of peace and rest, Edith finds herself sequestered at the hotel with an assortment of love's casualties and exiles. She also attracts the attention of a worldly man determined to release her unused capacity for mischief and pleasure."

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The Free Fall of Webster Cummings

By Tom Bodett

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Losing his arm in an Alaskan machinery accident, Ed Flannigan moves to Oregon, where he confronts New Age colonists, organic farmers, and a cranky guardian angel who resides in a peach tree.

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Pest Control

By Bill Fitzhugh

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"Bob Dillon can't get a break. A down-on-his-luck exterminator, all he wants is his own truck with a big fiberglass bug on top -- and success with his radical new, environmentally friendly pest-killing technique. So Bob decides to advertise. Unfortunately, one of his flyers falls into the wrong hands. Marcel, a shady Frenchman, needs an assassin to handle a million-dollar hit, and he figures that Bob Dillon is his man.

"Through no fault -- or participation -- of his own, this unwitting pest controller from Queens has become a major player in the dangerous world of contract murder. And now Bob's running for his life through the wormiest sections of the Big Apple -- one step ahead of a Bolivian executioner, a homicidal transvestite dwarf, meatheaded CIA agents, cabbies packing serious heat ... and the world's number-one hit man, who might just turn out to be the best friend Bob's got."

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Night of the Avenging Blowfish: A Novel of Covert Operations, Love, and Luncheon Meat

By John Welter

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"When a disgruntled chef plots to avenge himself on the President by serving lunch meat at a diplomatic dinner, Secret Service agent Doyle Coldiron is swept up in a tide of crazy events involving terrorists, activists, and a tipsy ambassador."

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Everything Is Illuminated

By Jonathan Safran Foer

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In the summer after his junior year of college, a writer--also named Jonathan Safran Foer--journeys to the farmlands of eastern Europe. Armed with only a yellowing photograph, he sets out to find the woman who, he has been told, saved his grandfather from the Nazis.

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