Burn the Midnight Oil with Side-Splitting Fiction
Discover side-splitting fiction books to keep you laughing late into the night! Explore hilarious reads perfect for burning the midnight oil with humor and wit.
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What Looks Like Crazy
by Charlotte Hughes
She's had hit after hit with Janet Evanovich. Now this New York Times bestselling author begins a series that readers will go crazy for. Psychologist Kate Holly's own life has become the stuff of intensive therapy. She's divorcing her gorgeous firefighter husband, she has an eccentric secretary, her mother and aunt have erected a vaguely sexual sculpture in her front yard, and her psychiatrist ex-boyfriend won't stop calling to find out what color panties she's wearing. Now, Kate's being bombarded with mysterious threats, and the only person who can help her is the one man who always makes her lose her mind-and heart.
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You Must Be This Happy to Enter
by Elizabeth Crane
Features stories about such subjects as a zombie who appears on a reality TV program, a time-traveling photographer who is arrested for being happy, and a woman waiting for her adopted child to arrive.
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What I was
by Meg Rosoff
In the 1960s, off the coast of East Anglia, a disgruntled boarding school student develops an obsessive friendship with a boy living by himself at the edge of the sea.
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Beginner's Greek
by James Collins
Falling hopelessly in love with a woman whose contact information he loses, Peter Russell perpetuates a series of events involving a woman's complicated marriage to a man in love with someone else, a man's debauchery, and an evil boss. 100,000 first printing.
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The Late Hector Kipling
by David Thewlis
Hector Kipling is a famous artist. But Hector is not as famous as his best friend, Lenny Snook. And as they are standing in the Tate Gallery one afternoon, Hector's life begins to unravel. For a painter, this existential crisis is the place from which great art is born. If the painter happens to be a forty-three-year-old man with a girlfriend away from home, it is the recipe for disaster. Soon it's all Hector can do to keep it together -- between his therapist who shows up drunk at a party and introduces herself to his parents, an irresistible young female poet with a terrifying taste for S&M, and a deranged stalker with an oil-and-canvas-inspired vendetta, just trying to cope is enough to make a man cry. As the events in his life threaten to drive him toward full-blown dementia, Hector finds himself in a bizarre and murderous pursuit of a man threatening to kill him in return, spiraling into a hysterically surreal Hitchcocklike thriller -- the story of how a man can become desperate enough to shoot his way out of a midlife crisis. At turns warm, witty, and joyfully absurd, David Thewlis's wicked comedy marks the debut of a savagely funny and observant literary talent.
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Zeroville
by Steve Erickson
First edition of Erickson's phantasmagorical meditation on the power of cinema. In Zeroville (optioned by James Franco in 2011), Vikar becomes a film editor, the job he always wanted, but but the drugs, music, and sexuality, may be more than he can handle.
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The Gum Thief
by Douglas Coupland
Over the course of several months, two retail workers at an office supply superstore--Roger, a divorced, middle-aged "aisles associate" at Staples, and his young co-worker, Bethany, an early twenty-something, former Goth--strike up a unique epistolary friendship, in a novel about love, loneliness, and the offbeat comforts of modern-day life.
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Grub
by Elise Blackwell
A novel of literary New York follows the lives of a cast of characters including editors, writers, and their friends over a five year period.
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Bad Monkeys
by Matt Ruff
Jane Charlotte has been arrested for murder. She tells police that she is a member of a secret organization devoted to fighting evil; her division is called the Department for the Final Disposition of Irredeemable Persons—"Bad Monkeys" for short. This confession earns Jane a trip to the jail's psychiatric wing, where a doctor attempts to determine whether she is lying, crazy—or playing a different game altogether. What follows is one of the most clever and gripping novels you'll ever read.
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Rosie Little's Cautionary Tales for Girls
by Danielle Wood
A collection of cautionary tales on such topics as virginity, commitment, love, work, longing, loss, and destiny.
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Mr. Sebastian and the Negro Magician
by Daniel Wallace
Traveling through the Deep South in 1950 with Jeremiah Musgrove's Chinese Circus, magician Henry Walker finds himself in deep trouble with three angry white teenagers, while his friends from the circus describe how Henry received the gift of magic from the devil himself.
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Trudy Hopedale
by Jeffrey Frank
"Amid tides of intrigue and shifting allegiances, this little town's extraordinary inhabitants swim helplessly, and alarmingly, toward their remarkable fates."--BOOK JACKET.
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Second Chance
by Jane Green
"The story of a group of people who haven't seen each other since they were best friends at school. When one of them dies in a terrible tragedy, the reunited friends work through their grief together and find that each of their lives is impacted in ways t
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Starting Out Sideways
by Mary E. Mitchell
Roseanna Plow is perfectly content with her nice, simple life on Long Island, despite the fact that she's being driven slowly insane by her meddling mother, who resembles Donna Reed on drugs. Rosie is very happy with her handsome husband and a fulfilling career as job counselor for the developmentally challenged. It might not be glamorous work, but Rosie is proud of the fact that she cares more about people than Prada. What more could a woman want in life? Except maybe being able to wear a sexy thong that doesn't make her behind look like a rump roast in butcher string... But when Rosie's incredible husband turns out to be an incredible putz--sleeping with her best friend Inga--her life goes from Seventh Heaven to Jerry Springer in the blink of an eye and the tip of a wine glass. Alone and deceived, but with her sense of humor still intact, Rosie turns to her wonderfully wacky mother to help her bounce back. Of course, Ma's recipe for mental recovery leaves much to be desired. And after Rosie discovers a painful family secret, hidden behind years of lies, she must set out to find herself and what really matters in life. Along the way, Rosie is surprised to find help from Mickey Hamilton, a.k.a. Ham, who is kind, generous, and has a great butt to match. If only Rosie can overlook the fact that he's nicknamed after the meat section at the local supermarket he manages. Milton, one of Rosie's endearing mentally challenged clients--and Ham's employee--also becomes a source of comfort along the way, always ready to defend "Miss Plow's" honor and warm her heart, even as it's breaking. And can a twenty-five-year-old punk office assistant with hair like candy corn really become Rosie's new best friend? As she moves along the twisted road to self-discovery, Rosie finds happiness, acceptance, and even love - though none of it in the places she'd expected. With laugh-out-loud scenes seamlessly interspersed among gut-wrenching moments of heartache, Starting Out Sideways is a unique and utterly delightful novel that will make you laugh, cry, and remember what's truly important in life.
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Gun Shy
by Ben Rehder
The National Weapons Alliance is holding a rally in Blanco County, and it's being headlined by country music star Mitch Campbell. But Campbell's a fraud and someone's set to expose him.
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What's Wrong with Dorfman?
by John Blumenthal
Martin Dorfman, a cynical, hypochondriacal, burned-out screenwriter, is in the midst of trying to develop his latest film script when he awakens one morning with a mysterious disease, an ailment that forces him into the fringes of alternative medicine and psychiatric counseling in search of a cure.
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The Story of My Baldness
by Marek van der Jagt
In this darkly funny novel, an obsessive Viennese philosophy student is in search of l'amour.
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Florence of Arabia
by Christopher Buckley
The bestselling author who made mincemeat of political correctness in Thank You for Smoking, conspiracy theories in Little Green Men, and Presidential indiscretions No Way to Treat a First Lady now takes on the hottest topic in the entire world–Arab-American relations–in a blistering comic novel sure to offend the few it doesn’t delight. Appalled by the punishment of her rebellious friend Nazrah, youngest and most petulant wife of Prince Bawad of Wasabia, Florence Farfarletti decides to draw a line in the sand. As Deputy to the deputy assistant secretary for Near East Affairs, Florence invents a far-reaching, wide-ranging plan for female emancipation in that part of the world. The U.S. government, of course, tells her to forget it. Publicly, that is. Privately, she’s enlisted in a top-secret mission to impose equal rights for the sexes on the small emirate of Matar (pronounced “Mutter”), the “Switzerland of the Persian Gulf.” Her crack team: a CIA killer, a snappy PR man, and a brilliant but frustrated gay bureaucrat. Her weapon: TV shows. The lineup on TV Matar includes A Thousand and One Mornings, a daytime talk show that features self-defense tips to be used against boyfriends during Ramadan; an addictive soap opera featuring strangely familiar members of the Matar royal family; and a sitcom about an inept but ruthless squad of religious police, pitched as “Friends from Hell.” The result: the first deadly car bombs in the country since 1936, a fatwa against the station’s entire staff, a struggle for control of the kingdom, and, of course, interference from the French. And that’s only the beginning. A merciless dismantling of both American ineptitude and Arabic intolerance, Florence of Arabia is Christopher Buckley’s funniest and most serious novel yet, a biting satire of how U.S. good intentions can cause the Shiite to hit the fan.
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Boomsday
by Christopher Buckley
Inciting a culture war when she suggests that baby boomers should be given government incentives to commit suicide, twenty-nine-year-old blogger and political malcontent Cassandra Devine catches the attention of an ambitious senator seeking the presidency, with whom she launches a campaign during which euthanasia is a forefront issue.
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Thank You for Smoking
by Christopher Buckley
NOW A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE • NATIONAL BESTSELLER • NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY PEOPLE AND USA TODAY • A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK Nobody blows smoke like Nick Naylor. He’s a spokesman for the Academy of Tobacco Studies–in other words, a flack for cigarette companies, paid to promote their product on talk and news shows. The problem? He’s so good at his job, so effortlessly unethical, that he’s become a target for both anti-tobacco terrorists and for the FBI. In a country where half the people want to outlaw pleasure and the other want to sell you a disease, what will become of Nick Naylor?
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The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole, Aged 13 3/4
by Sue Townsend
Adrian Mole's first love, Pandora, has left him; a neighbor, Mr. Lucas, appears to be seducing his mother (and what does that mean for his father?); the BBC refuses to publish his poetry; and his dog swallowed the tree off the Christmas cake. "Why" indeed.