This anthology presents a selection of short works from mainstream and alternative American periodicals published in 2017, including nonfiction, screenplays, television writing, fiction, and alternative comics.

The second collection of short stories from the highly acclaimed author of THE AMAZING ADVENTURES OF KAVALIER & CLAY and WONDER BOYS. There are the two boys of the title story, locked in their own world of fantasy and make-believe, reaching out to each other to survive the terrible prospect of fatherlessness. 'House Hunting' shows us the grim spectacle of a couple whose marriage is in its death throes, and whose search for a happy home is doomed; in another story a couple struggle to overcome the effects of a brutal rape. Elsewhere, a family therapist comes face to face with the dark secret of his childhood, and an American football star down on his luck makes his peace with his father. The collection culminates in a daring and wonderfully baroque horror story, 'In the Black Mill', which chronicles the terrifying fate that befalls an archaeologist as he uncovers cannibalism and ritual sacrifice in a gloomy Pennsylvanian town. Serious in their subject matter, yet shot through with wit, humour and compassion, these nine short stories are testament to Chabon's ability to weave together comedy and tragedy with unforgettable results.

Hi, I'm Jenny Mollen, an actress and writer living in Los Angeles. I'm also a wife, married to someone more famous than me, which is especially annoying because all the free clothing he gets never come in a size small. This is my book, an assortment of stories about not doing the right thing. Yes, it's about me. But it's also about women, who all come in two types: those that are totally batshit crazy, and those that are liars. It's a book about acting on impulses, plotting elaborate hoaxes, and refusing to acknowledge boundaries in any form. Like hiding in the trunk of a car to get a look at the girl who used to fuck my husband. Or pretending to have a seizure on a red-eye to New York in order to explain why my dog is balls-deep in a bag of Pirates' Booty burrowed in the lap of a sleeping child. Life is too short for bullshit. I'm 33 and my tits drop half an inch a year. Someday very soon, ladies, you and I are going to be whatever fetish comes after "cougar," unable to wear shirts without sleeves, and full of cell phone cancer. It is our obligation to be honest with ourselves about who we really are and what we really want. Which more often than not is someone else's email password. So let's embrace it. I Like You Just the Way I Am is a book about taking the high road—as long as it intersects with the train tracks my ex-boyfriend is tied to.

Laugh till you cry in this new collection of stories from the award-winning "Serena Williams of humor writing" ( New York Times Book Review ) about raising babies and trying not to be one. Called a "comedic Godsend" by Conan O'Brien and "the Stephen King of comedy writing" by John Mulaney, Simon Rich is back with New Teeth, his funniest and most personal collection yet. Two murderous pirates find a child stowaway on board and attempt to balance pillaging with co-parenting. A woman raised by wolves prepares for her parents' annual Thanksgiving visit. An aging mutant superhero is forced to learn humility when the mayor kicks him upstairs to a desk job. And in the hard-boiled caper "The Big Nap," a weary two-year-old detective struggles to make sense of "a world gone mad." Equal parts silly and sincere, New Teeth is an ode to growing up, growing older, and what it means to make a family.

The New Yorker dishes up a feast of delicious writing–food and drink memoirs, short stories, tell-alls, and poems, seasoned with a generous dash of cartoons. “To read this sparely elegant, moving portrait is to remember that writing well about food is really no different from writing well about life.”— Saveur (Ten Best Books of the Year) Since its earliest days, The New Yorker has been a tastemaker—literally. In this indispensable collection, M.F.K. Fisher pays homage to “cookery witches,” those mysterious cooks who possess “an uncanny power over food,” and Adam Gopnik asks if French cuisine is done for. There is Roald Dahl’s famous story “Taste,” in which a wine snob’s palate comes in for some unwelcome scrutiny, and Julian Barnes’s ingenious tale of a lifelong gourmand who goes on a very peculiar diet. Selected from the magazine’s plentiful larder, Secret Ingredients celebrates all forms of gustatory delight. A sample of the menu: Roger Angell on the art of the martini • Don DeLillo on Jell-O • Malcolm Gladwell on building a better ketchup • Jane Kramer on the writer’s kitchen • Chang-rae Lee on eating sea urchin • Steve Martin on menu mores • Alice McDermott on sex and ice cream • Dorothy Parker on dinner conversation • S. J. Perelman on a hollandaise assassin • Calvin Trillin on New York’s best bagel Whether you’re in the mood for snacking on humor pieces and cartoons or for savoring classic profiles of great chefs and great eaters, these offerings from The New Yorker ’s fabled history are sure to satisfy every taste.

"In 1936, a 20-year-old artist using the name Willis B. Rensie jump-started the comic-book medium. Writing and illustrating an action-packed weekly serial called Hawks of the Seas-- a pirate adventure series set in the 18th-century Caribbean-- the artist created one dynamic strip after another, honing his storytelling craft and shaping the comics medium with each one. That artist was none other than comics grand master Will Eisner From 1936 to 1938, Eisner's Hawks of the Seas weekly stories were translated into several different languages and distributed all over the world, and now they're collected here in this handsome hardcover edition"--Goodreads.com.

Short and pithy sketches on the weird and wonderful world of love. It doesn't matter if you're a caveman, a time traveller or a regular person. Sooner or later, someone's going to break your heart. The sketches in Simon Rich's new book are bizarre, funny, and - if you've ever been in love - all too familiar. From the invisible man stalking his ex, to Sherlock Holmes' only blind spot, The Last Girlfriend on Earth is always enchanting, often sweet, though occasionally awkward. Just like love itself.

The world of comedy and comedians of the last five decades. By the man the New York Times calls a comic institution himself, the only comedian (twenty-six years in stand-up) to have made Elie Wiesel laugh, as well as having appeared on The Tonight Show (140 times, second only to Bob Hope, but who's counting). From the director of TV comedy series Mad About You, Seinfeld, Friends, Weeds and Curb Your Enthusiasm . Larry David: "I'm lucky. I know and love David Steinberg. You don't. Now's your chance. Don't blow it! "David has always been a comedy hero to me. One of his many gifts is the ability to inspire funny people to be even funnier, as you will discover in this truly hilarious, insightful book." --Martin Short From David Steinberg, a rabbi's son from Winnipeg, Canada, who at age fifteen enrolled at Hebrew Theological College in Chicago (the rabbinate wasn't for him) and four years later, entered the master's program in English literature at the University of Chicago, until he saw Lenny Bruce, the Blue Boy of Comedy, the coolest guy Steinberg had ever seen, and joined Chicago's Second City improvisational group, becoming, instead, the comedian's comedian, director, actor, working with, inspired by, teaching, and learning from the most celebrated, admired, complicated comedians, then and now--a funny, moving, provocative, insightful look into the soul, wit, and bite of comedy and comedians--a universe unto itself--of the last half-century. From the greats: George Burns, Lenny Bruce, Sid Caesar, Lucille Ball, Mel Brooks, and Carl Reiner, et al., to the newer greats: Carol Burnett, Steve Martin, Lily Tomlin, Billy Crystal, Bob Newhart, and the man for all comedy, Martin (Marty) Short; to the greats of right now: Chris Rock, Dave Chappelle, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Wanda Sykes; and more . . . Steinberg, through stories, reminiscences, tales of directing, touring, performing, and, through the comedians themselves talking (from more than 75 interviews), makes clear why he loves comedy and comedians who have been by his side in his work, and in his life, for more than sixty years. Here are: Will Ferrell, Eric Idle, Whoopi Goldberg, Mike Myers, Groucho himself and the greatest of them all (at least of the last half century), Jonathan Winters . . .

This selection from the first ten years of the Evergreen Review gives the full flavor of the energy, savvy, excitement, and gall that characterized the magazine during the days of its publication. It also happens to bring together some of the world’s best writers in one volume, in the company of their peers. Evergreen was more than another literary magazine. Founded by Barney Rossett of Grove Press and publishing from 1957 through 1973 (it now exists as an online only magazine), it was the voice of a movement that helped to change the attitudes and prejudices of the culture at large through the language of art—and succeeded. It was always damn the torpedoes and full speed ahead. Here are original short stories by Samuel Beckett and Jack Kerouac (with his “October in the Railroad Earth” predating the publication of On the Road ); Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl” (previously published only as a pamphlet); a selection from Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s A Coney Island of the Mind ; and a passage from Alexander Trocchi’s Cain’s Book . Also included are a fantastic sample of the original and iconic magazine covers which were works of art themselves—a heavily bearded Ginsberg cavorting in a sport coat and Uncle Sam top hat in 1966—and several reprinted comic strips; notably, Michael O’Donoghue’s “The Adventure of Phoebe Zeit-geist.”

In The Age of Wire and String, hailed by Robert Coover as "the most audacious literary debut in decades," Ben Marcus weilds together a new reality from the scrapheap of the past. Dogs, birds, horses, automobiles, and the weather are some of the recycled elements in Marcus's first collection—part fiction, part handbook—as familiar objects take on markedly unfamiliar meanings. Gradually, this makeshift world, in its defiance of the laws of physics and language, finds a foundation in its own implausibility, as Marcus produces new feelings and sensations—both comic and disturbing—in the definitive guide to an unpredictable yet exhilarating plane of existence.

The author of the widely syndicated "Uncivil Liberties" column ruminates on everything from Fidel Castro to the calorie count of his favorite food. "Trillin is a curmudgeon's curmudgeon".--People.

"A laugh on every page, Christina Oxenberg is one of the most lethal wits of the western world." - Robert F. Kennedy Jr.Humorous, short stories by Christina Oxenberg, an author known for her sharp imagery and dark sense of humor.This collection of short stories cover topics like Oxenberg's love of dancing in the clubs of Key West, Florida all night long and forays North to supper with the social set, and at all times with a questioning eye, taking note.

Do these Gloves Make my Ass Look Fat? is Christina Oxenberg's collection of funny, punchy short stories and anecdotes which chronicles the life of the eccentric author. Scenes and scenarios revolve around her experiences in her adopted home of Key West, Florida & her hometown of New York City, and its environs.

Life is Short: Read Short Stories is Christina Oxenberg's 3rd collection of funny, punchy short stories and anecdotes and chronicles a year in the life of the eccentric author. Scenes and scenarios revolve around her experiences in her adopted home of Key West, Florida & her hometown of New York City, and its environs.

A few years ago, Christopher Buckley wrote of Bruce Jay Friedman in the New York Times Book Review that he "has been likened to everyone from J. D. Salinger to Woody Allen," but that "he is: Bruce Jay Friedman, sui generis, and no mean thing. No further comparisons are necessary." We are happy to report that he remains the same Bruce Jay Friedman in his unique, unblinking, and slightly tilted essays—collected here for the first time—in Even the Rhinos Were Nymphos . A butler school in Houston, a livestock auction in Little Rock, a home for "frozen guys" in California, JFK's humidor in Manhattan—all are jumping off points for Friedman's baleful and sharply satirical scrutiny of American life and behavior in the second half of the twentieth century. Travel with Friedman from Harlem to Hollywood, from Port-au-Prince to Etta's Eat Shop in Chicago. In these pieces, which were published in literary and mass-circulation magazines from the 1960s to the 1990s, you'll meet such luminaries as Castro and Clinton, Natalie Wood and Clint Eastwood, and even Friedman's friends Irwin Shaw, Nelson Algren, and Mario Puzo. Friedman is a master of the essay, whether the subject is crime reporting ("Lessons of the Street"), Hollywood shenanigans ("My Life among the Stars"), or his outrageous adventures as the editor of pulp magazines (the classic "Even the Rhinos Were Nymphos"). We could sing his praises as a journalist, humorist, and social critic. But, as Buckley tells us, being Bruce Jay Friedman is enough. Bruce Jay Friedman is the author of seven novels (including The Dick , Stern , and A Mother's Kisses ), four collections of short stories, four full-length plays (including Scuba Duba and Steambath ), and the screenplays for the movies Splash and Stir Crazy .

'A brilliantly funny writer' Sunday Telegraph Swap a bomb for three ice-creams on a train ... bounce on a vampire's bed ... eat a pizza that makes you fearless ... read the secret diary of a dog ... unleash the awesome power of chips ... save ten lives with a paper clip ... surprise your mum with a chainsaw ... use a demolition ball to defeat a bully ... live in a house that gets wiped clean more often than a bottom ... and lots more! *Includes the stories from Give Peas A Chance , Pizza Cake and Snot Chocolate plus a BONUS new story ------------------ PRAISE FOR MORRIS GLEITZMAN 'Readers can't get enough of him.' The Independent 'A virtuoso demonstration of how you can make comedy out of the most unlikely subject' Sunday Times 'He is one of the finest examples of a writer who can make humour stem from the things that really matter in life.' The Guardian

This collection of stories features a freewheeling version of the creation of the Disney empire--young Walt liked to sketch little animals and his brother Will was a nascent Alexander the Great of entertainment--and a story about primal therapy and circumcision

I want my ears back! What's next, my nose? When you call someone and they put you "on hold," they are in control of you. Maybe it's because I was raised in "the land of the free" that this irks everything irkable in me. Would you allow a clerk in a store to grab you by the ears as soon as you walked in and hold you in place until they were ready to talk to you? While they talked to someone else? At the very least, that might be temporary involuntary imprisonment, or some kind of mild kidnapping. I think you could almost go to jail for that. Why then, do we allow, indeed, make it legal, on the phone? As angry as I got, I couldn't continue yelling at innocent furniture while I was "on hold." I'm sure it's bad for me, and it can't be good for my furniture. In an effort to turn my aggravating conundrum into something possibly positive, I conducted, and funded with loose change, an independent experimental stress- release study. When I was put "on hold," I would write. Whatever came to mind. Just let my head roam range-free. Short stories that I might come back to, quick thoughts, poems, blurps, ideas, frustrations -- whatever popped into my head was in-bounds. My phone and my computer would become my laboratory. My pants would remain my pants. Therefore, this book is a diary, if you will, of my time spent "on hold" during Phase One of my amateur mental-health experiment, designed to turn frustrating hostility into an unfettered, rumpled voice. A little taste of ON HOLD: It was 892 and everyone was playing "Smack The Lout" invented by Dylan Puddler. "Tag, Your It" was his. So was "Ring Around The Rosey." His unsuccessful efforts include "Lick the Oaf and Make Him Cry," Hide The Fish" and "No, You Kiss It."

The characters in Annie Reiner's first collection of short stories inhabit a world somewhere between reality and fantasy. Both poetic and amusing, with their own unique style, these stories flow down a quirky stream of consciousness to reveal what's really on people's minds below the surface of ordinary logic.

This is the first in a series of books compiling my short stories I've written over the past twelve or more years. I am a book ghost writer and editor of long standing, and these stories reflect a variety of different genres, including fiction and nonfiction, where I wrote either for practice or in order to improve my writing. Original, suspenseful tales; gripping, humorous, including horror, science fiction, narrative nonfiction, and a host of other topics as perceptively descriptive stories, which should help you perceive the Universe in a whole new intrinsically original and realistic light.