If you live in the Midwest, you have to know how to laugh. Tornados, floods, drought, and miles and miles of flat land: if you don't have a sense of humor, you might want to consider living somewhere else. Humor is as natural to the Midwest as cow pats and corn mazes, seed caps and road kill, Johnny Carson and David Letterman. This book gathers some of the best stories from the humorists of the big belly of America, past and present. Here are Mark Twain, George Ade, Finley Peter Dunne, Don Marquis, and Ring Lardner; James Thurber, Ruth McKenney, Erma Bombeck, Calvin Trillin, and Garrison Keillor—Midwesterners, one and all. There's even a piece from William Dean Howells, not usually known for his knock-me-down humor. You'll also find tales from Ambrose Bierce, Kin Hubbard, Sinclair Lewis, Mike Royko, Donald Kaul, P. J. O'Rourke, and Bill Bryson. Here is a book to curl up with when the cows don't come home, the crick's flooded, and the fox has bedded down in the henhouse. It'll put a smile on your face and make you glad you don't live in New York City, even if you do.

This tale of an awkward Israeli widower and his misadventures with women is an “extraordinary novel . . . a masterpiece” (Los Angeles Times). After seven long years of illness, Molkho’s wife passes, leaving him in mourning, but also with an unexpected sense of freedom. No longer is he bound to being a caretaker for a woman too sick to even bear his touch. His future—and his desires—are his own. As the seasons of his life propel the hapless middle-aged accountant through a series of journeys and a string of infatuations—with an unwanted wife, an aggressive bureaucrat, a young girl, and a Russian émigré—Molkho begins to find the real element that was missing in his life was not romance, but his own will. An absurd, tragic, humorous, and hopeful meditation on love, marriage, and the quiet struggles of average Israeli lives, Five Seasons “reconfirms [A. B. Yehoshua’s] status as a shrewd analyst of domestic ordeals” (Publishers Weekly).

A book of humor and satire covers topics from baseball to Macbeth.

Twenty-first-century private detective Conrad Metcalf has a dead doctor on his hands, a monkey on his back, and a kangaroo in his waiting room in a first novel with a sharp-edged, funny vision of the future.

It's 2050, and humans are an endangered species. Lieutenant Robert Sutton has survived the collapse of civilization by luck, his wits, and a chance mutation that makes him immune to the nano-virus that has wiped out millions. Now, his compound of survivors is surrounded by the infected, who are driven by the need to spread the contagion through sex. It is only a matter of time before they attack. So when Sutton is assigned to interrogate a prisoner who claims to have overcome the infection, he immediately suspects a trap... Nicholas Rider may have survived the virus, but he's a changed man, ruled by his desires. But his need for Sutton is different. Rider craves an end to his overwhelming needs, and Sutton could be the man to do it. Secure in his belief that he's invulnerable, Sutton can't understand or resist his intense attraction to his prisoner. Will Rider be his downfall—or his savior? 30,000 words

Indianapolis Monthly is the Circle City’s essential chronicle and guide, an indispensable authority on what’s new and what’s news. Through coverage of politics, crime, dining, style, business, sports, and arts and entertainment, each issue offers compelling narrative stories and lively, urbane coverage of Indy’s cultural landscape.

How did fears of the Cold War shape Australian images of Asia? What was the nature of the Vietnamese revolution, which some 50 000 Australian troops failed to reverse in the 1960s? How did a small and marginal peace movement grow into the powerful Moratorium and did it have any impact on the course of the War? Harvest of Fear is a beautifully craf

For more than 50 years John Clute has been reviewing science fiction and fantasy. As Scores demonstrates, his devotion to the task of understanding the central literatures of our era has not slackened. There are jokes in Scores, and curses, and tirades, and apologies, and riffs; but every word of every review, in the end, is about how we understand the stories we tell about the world. Following on from his two previous books of collected reviews (Strokes and Look at the Evidence) this book collects reviews from a wide variety of sources, but mostly from Interzone, the New York Review of Science Fiction, and Science Fiction Weekly. Where it has seemed possible to do so without distorting contemporary responses to books, these reviews have been revised, sometimes extensively. 125 review articles, over 200 books reviewed in more than 214,000 words.

Explores a new area of ancient literary theory and criticism by examining how landscape and metaphor shape discussions of style.

In the 1920s, 20,000 Mennonites left the newly formed Soviet Union and emigrated to Canada. Among them were Heinrich and Helena Kroeger and their five children. Based on Heinrich's diaries and letters, and archival research, Hard Passage speaks to the indomitable spirit of Mennonite immigrants to the Canadian West.