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How to Be an Alien: A Handbook for Beginners and Advanced Pupils
George Mikes · back to the book
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24 books with the same feel
Hide books by the same authorTalk to the Hand: The Utter Bloody Rudeness of the World Today, or Six Good Reasons to Stay Home and Bolt the Door
Lynne Truss · 214 pages
An evaluation of the way discourteous behavior has become commonplace and even applauded in today's society is a humorous call to arms that challenges ill manners and the practices that support them.
How to Travel with a Salmon and Other Essays
Umberto Eco · 248 pages
How to Travel with a Salmon is a highly engaging collection of what Umberto Eco calls his diario minimo - minimal diaries - after the magazine column in which he began "pursuing the pathways of parody.". These essays, written in the late eighties and early nineties, are his playful but unfailingly accurate takes on militarism, computer jargon, Westerns, art criticism, librarians, bureaucrats, mea
Don't Get Too Comfortable: The Indignities of Coach Class, The Torments of Low Thread Count, The Never-Ending Quest for Artisanal Olive Oil, and Other First World Problems
David Rakoff · 222 pages
David Rakoff’s bestselling collection of autobiographical essays, Fraud, established him as one of today’s funniest and most insightful writers. Now, in Don’t Get Too Comfortable, Rakoff moves from the personal to the public, journeying into the land of unchecked plenty that is contemporary America. Rarely have greed, vanity, selfishness, and vapidity been so mercilessly and wittily skewered. S
A Man Without a Country
Kurt Vonnegut Jr. · 146 pages
***A Man Without a Country*** is Kurt Vonnegut’s hilariously funny and razor-sharp look at life ("If I die—God forbid—I would like to go to heaven to ask somebody in charge up there, ‘Hey, what was the good news and what was the bad news?"), art ("To practice any art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow. So do it."), politics ("I asked former Yankees pitcher Jim Bouton wha
The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms
Nassim Nicholas Taleb · 128 pages
By the author of the modern classic The Black Swan, this collection of aphorisms and meditations expresses Taleb's view of modern civilization's hubristic side effects--modifying humans to satisfy technology, blaming reality for not fitting economic models, inventing diseases to sell drugs, defining intelligence as what can be tested in a classroom, and convincing people that employment is not sla
Bossypants
Tina Fey · 277 pages
Tina Fey’s new book *Bossypants* is short, messy, and impossibly funny (an apt description of the comedian herself). From her humble roots growing up in Pennsylvania to her days doing amateur improv in Chicago to her early sketches on Saturday Night Live, Fey gives us a fascinating glimpse behind the curtain of modern comedy with equal doses of wit, candor, and self-deprecation. Some of the funnie
I'm a Stranger Here Myself: Notes on Returning to America after Twenty Years Away
Bill Bryson · 381 pages
After living in Britain for two decades, Bill Bryson recently moved back to the United States with his English wife and four children (he had read somewhere that nearly 3 million Americans believed they had been abducted by aliens--as he later put it, "it was clear my people needed me"). They were greeted by a new and improved America that boasts microwave pancakes, twenty-four-hour dental-floss
Thud!
Terry Pratchett · 398 pages
Koom Valley? That was where the trolls ambushed the dwarfs, or the dwarfs ambushed the trolls. It was far away. It was a long time ago. But if he doesn't solve the murder of just one dwarf, Commander Sam Vimes of Ankh-Morpork City Watch is going to see it fought again, right outside his office. With his beloved Watch crumbling around him and war-drums sounding, he must unravel every clue, ou
Parliament of Whores: A Lone Humorist Attempts to Explain the Entire U.S. Government
P.J. O'Rourke · 233 pages
In 1988 the author moved to Washington to take a long look at our government and to find an answer to the question every American asks: What the hell do these guys do all day, and why does it cost so much money? In his Introduction, he proffers the theory that we are suffering under a dictatorship of boredom. Adopting the manner of a high school civics textbook, he covers the three branches of gov
Wall and Piece
Banksy · 207 pages
From the Publisher: Graffiti artist Banksy decorates streets, walls, bridges and zoos of towns and cities throughout the world. His identity remains unknown but his work is witty, subversive and prolific. And now, he's put together the best of his work in a fully illustrated color volume.
The New New Rules: A Funny Look At How Everybody But Me Has Their Head Up Their Ass
Bill Maher · 354 pages
From bestselling author and host of HBO's "Real Time," Bill Maher's new book of political riffs serves up a savagely funny set of rules for preserving sanity in an insane world.
A Tramp Abroad
Mark Twain · 410 pages
Twain's account of traveling in Europe. A Tramp Abroad sparkles with the author's shrewd observations and highly opinionated comments on Old World culture. A Tramp Abroad includes among its adventures a voyage by raft down the Neckar and an ascent of Mont Blanc by telescope, as well as the author's attempts to study art.
The Unabridged Devil's Dictionary
Ambrose Bierce · 395 pages
"A virtual onslaught of acerbic, confrontational wordplay, The Unabridged Devil's Dictionary offers some 1,600 wickedly clever definitions to the vocabulary of everyday life. Little is sacred and few are safe, for Bierce targets just about any pursuit, from matrimony to immortality, that allows our willful failings and excesses to shine forth.". "All of Bierce's known satiric definitions are here
White Teeth
Zadie Smith · 480 pages
One of the most talked about fictional debuts of recent years, WHITE TEETH is a funny, generous, big-hearted novel, adored by critics and readers alike. Dealing - among many other things - with friendship, love, war, three cultures and three families over three generations, one brown mouse, and the tricky way the past has of coming back and biting you on the ankle, it is a life-affirming, riotous
The Trouble With Women
Jacky Fleming · 122 pages
The Trouble with Women is a feminist's brilliant, tongue-in-cheek,look at women's "issues," "frailties," and "failures" in our not-so-distant history. Ever noticed that women don't feature much in history books, and wondered why? Then this is the book for you. In The Trouble with Women, feminist artist Jacky Fleming illustrates how the opinions of supposed male geniuses, such as Charles Darwin (w
The Complete Yes Minister
Jonathan Lynn, Antony Jay · 514 pages
Me Talk Pretty One Day
David Sedaris · 272 pages
A recent transplant to Paris, humorist David Sedaris, bestselling author of “Naked”, presents a collection of his strongest work yet, including the title story about his hilarious attempt to learn French. David Sedaris' move to Paris from New York inspired these hilarious pieces, including the title essay, about his attempts to learn French from a sadistic teacher who declares that every day sp
Masters of Atlantis
Charles Portis · 247 pages
Masters of Atlantis is a cock-eyed journey into an America of misfits and con-men, oddballs, and innocents. Lamar Jimmerson is the leader of the Gnomon Society, the international fraternal order dedicated to preserving the arcane wisdom of the lost city of Atlantis. Stationed in France in 1917, Jimmerson comes across a little book crammed with Atlantean puzzles, Egyptian riddles, and extended alc
How to be a Brit: The Classic Bestselling Guide
George Mikes · 268 pages
Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch
Terry Pratchett, Neil Gaiman · 400 pages
Armageddon only happens once, you know. They don't let you go around again until you get it right. According to the Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch - the world's only totally reliable guide to the future, written in 1655, before she exploded - the world will end on a Saturday. Next Saturday, in fact. Just after tea... People have been predicting the end of the world al