Pride and Prejudice and Zombies


Seth Grahame-Smith - 2009
    As our story opens, a mysterious plague has fallen upon the quiet English village of Meryton—and the dead are returning to life! Feisty heroine Elizabeth Bennet is determined to wipe out the zombie menace, but she’s soon distracted by the arrival of the haughty and arrogant Mr. Darcy. What ensues is a delightful comedy of manners with plenty of civilized sparring between the two young lovers—and even more violent sparring on the blood-soaked battlefield. Can Elizabeth vanquish the spawn of Satan? And overcome the social prejudices of the class-conscious landed gentry? Complete with romance, heartbreak, swordfights, cannibalism, and thousands of rotting corpses,

Lake Wobegon Days


Garrison Keillor - 1985
    "Filled with warmth and humor, sadness and tenderness, songs and poems, Lake Wobegon Days is an unforgettable portrait of small-town American life, of why 'we are what we are' and why 'smart doesn't count for much."

Butcher's Crossing


John Williams - 1960
    With Butcher’s Crossing, his fiercely intelligent, beautifully written western, Williams dismantles the myths of modern America.It is the 1870s, and Will Andrews, fired up by Emerson to seek “an original relation to nature,” drops out of Harvard and heads west. He washes up in Butcher’s Crossing, a small Kansas town on the outskirts of nowhere. Butcher’s Crossing is full of restless men looking for ways to make money and ways to waste it. Before long Andrews strikes up a friendship with one of them, a man who regales Andrews with tales of immense herds of buffalo, ready for the taking, hidden away in a beautiful valley deep in the Colorado Rockies. He convinces Andrews to join in an expedition to track the animals down. The journey out is grueling, but at the end is a place of paradisal richness. Once there, however, the three men abandon themselves to an orgy of slaughter, so caught up in killing buffalo that they lose all sense of time. Winter soon overtakes them: they are snowed in. Next spring, half-insane with cabin fever, cold, and hunger, they stagger back to Butcher’s Crossing to find a world as irremediably changed as they have been.

Texts from Jane Eyre: And Other Conversations with Your Favorite Literary Characters


Mallory Ortberg - 2014
    Everyone knows that if Scarlett O’Hara had an unlimited text-and-data plan, she’d constantly try to tempt Ashley away from Melanie with suggestive messages. If Mr. Rochester could text Jane Eyre, his ardent missives would obviously be in all-caps. And Daisy Buchanan would not only text while driving, she’d text you to pick her up after she totaled her car. Based on the popular web-feature, Texts from Jane Eyre is a witty, irreverent mashup that brings the characters from your favorite books into the twenty-first century.

The Flying Machine


Ray Bradbury - 1953
    A famous short story

The Sot-Weed Factor


John Barth - 1960
    Set in the late 1600s, it recounts the wildly chaotic odyssey of hapless, ungainly Ebenezer Cooke, sent to the New World to look after his father's tobacco business and to record the struggles of the Maryland colony in an epic poem.On his mission, Cooke experiences capture by pirates and Indians; the loss of his father's estate to roguish impostors; love for a farmer prostitute; stealthy efforts to rob him of his virginity, which he is (almost) determined to protect; and an extraordinary gallery of treacherous characters who continually switch identities. A hilarious, bawdy tribute to all the most insidious human vices, The Sot-Weed Factor has a lasting relevance for readers of all times.

Young Zaphod Plays It Safe


Douglas Adams - 1986
    It doesn't appear as a standalone work, but is included with several collections. The story is a prequel to the events in The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy and has the young Zaphod Beeblebrox working as a salvage ship operator. He guides some bureaucrats to a crashed spaceship which may be leaking some hazardous materials. The bureaucrats are determined to "make it safe". The comic asides in the story include some of the time travel paradoxes which are a common running theme in Adams' SF work, and plenty of material about lobsters

The Law of Life: a Jamestown classic adapted from Jack London


Walter Pauk - 1976
    

Twenty-Six Men and a Girl


Maxim Gorky - 2009
    They are looked down upon by all around them, including the bun bakers. Their only seeming solace is the sixteen-year-old Tanya who visits them every morning for the kringles they give her.

The Short Reign of Pippin IV


John Steinbeck - 1957
    Enchanting comedy ensues as Steinbeck creates the most hilarious royal court ever around the brief, bold reign of the corduroy-clad Pippin, his social-climbing wife Maria, his star-struck daughter Clotilde and her Californian beau, Todd.

The Lady or the Tiger? And, the Discourager of Hesitancy


Frank R. Stockton - 1882
    The system worked this way: When a man committed a crime important enough to interest the king, notice was given that the fate of the accused person would be decided, on a given date, in the arena of the amphitheater. When the date arrived and everyone had assembled in the galleries, the king gave a signal, a door beneath him opened, and the accused stepped out into the arena. Two doors, exactly alike and side by side, faced the accused, and it was his duty to open one of them. He could open either door he pleased. If he opened the one, a hungry tiger would spring upon him and tear him to pieces. But, if he opened the other door, a beautiful lady came out and the accused was immediately married to her, as a reward for his innocence.The king had a beautiful daughter, with whom a young man of common blood fell in love. The king's daughter was also in love with the young man. The love affair went on for some time before the king discovered its existence. Immediately, the king had the youth placed into prison and set a day for the trial in the arena. The appointed day arrived, and the galleries of the arena were filled. The signal was given, a door beneath the royal party opened, and the lover of the princess walked into the arena. The princess, through the use of her position and money, had learned behind which door stood the lady and behind which waited the tiger. The youth expected her to have learned this information, and he looked toward her for a signal. Her signal was toward the right, and the youth went to the door on the right and opened it. The story leaves it up to the reader to decide which came out of the door--the lady or the tiger. Which did the princess decide? Was it to let her lover to live and love another woman, or did she decide that if she couldn't have him no one would?

The Pursuit of Love


Nancy Mitford - 1945
    Nancy Mitford's most famous novel, The Pursuit of Love satirizes British aristocracy in the twenties and thirties through the amorous adventures of the Radletts, an exuberantly unconventional family closely modelled on Mitford's own.The Radletts of Alconleigh occupy the heights of genteel eccentricity, from terrifying Lord Alconleigh (who, like Mitford's father, used to hunt his children with bloodhounds when foxes were not available), to his gentle wife, Sadie, their wayward daughter Linda, and the other six lively Radlett children. Mitford's wickedly funny prose follows these characters through misguided marriages and dramatic love affairs, as the shadow of World War II begins to close in on their rapidly vanishing world.

The Diary of a Nobody


George Grossmith - 1889
    Yet he always seems to be troubled by disagreeable tradesmen, impertinent young office clerks and wayward friends, not to mention his devil-may-care son Lupin with his unsuitable choice of bride. Try as he might, he cannot avoid life's embarrassing mishaps. In the bumbling, absurd, yet ultimately endearing figure of Pooter, the Grossmiths created an immortal comic character and a superb satire on the snobberies of middle-class suburbia - one which also sends up late Victorian crazes for spiritualism and bicycling, as well as the fashion for publishing diaries by anybody and everybody.

Dawn of the Dreadfuls


Steve Hockensmith - 2007
    As our story opens, the Bennet sisters are enjoying a peaceful life in the English countryside. They idle away the days reading, gardening, and daydreaming about future husbands - until a funeral at the local parish goes strangely and horribly awry.Suddenly corpses are springing from the soft earth - and only one family can stop them. As the bodies pile up, we watch Elizabeth Bennet evolve from a naive young teenager into a savage slayer of the undead. Along the way, two men vie for her affections: Master Hawksworth is the powerful warrior who trains her to kill, while thoughtful Dr. Keckilpenny seeks to conquer the walking dead using science instead of strength. Will either man win the prize of Elizabeth's heart? Or will their hearts be feasted upon by hordes of marauding zombies? Complete with romance, action, comedy, and an army of shambling corpses, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies: Dawn of the Dreadfuls will have Jane Austen rolling in her grave - and just might inspire her to crawl out of it!(Description from back cover of trade paperback edition)

Rip Van Winkle


Washington Irving - 1819
    This deluxe gift edition carefully reproduces thity-four of Arthir Rackham's enchanting and exquisuute paintings.