Ever since John Hancock broke into song after signing the Declaration of Independence, American politics and musicals have been inextricably linked. From Alexander Hamilton's jazz hands, to Chester A. Arthur's oboe operas, to Newt Gingrich's off-Broadway sexscapade, You, Me, and My Moon Colony Mistress Makes Three, government and musical theater have joined forces to document our nation's long history of freedom, partisanship, and dancers on roller skates pretending to be choo choo trains. To celebrate this grand union of entrenched bureaucracy and song, the patriots at McSweeney's Internet Tendency (“The Iowa Caucus of humor websites”) offer this riotous collection (peacefully assembled!) of monologues, charts, scripts, lists, diatribes, AND musicals written by the noted fake-musical lyricist, Ben Greenman. On the agenda are . . . Fragments from PALIN! THE MUSICAL Barack Obama’s Undersold 2012 Campaign Slogans Atlas Shrugged Updated for the Financial Crisis Your Attempts to Legislate Hunting Man for Sport Reek of Class Warfare A 1980s Teen Sex Comedy Becomes Politically Uncomfortable Donald Rumsfeld Memoir Chapter Title Or German Heavy Metal Song? Noises Political Pundits Would Make If They Were Wild Animals and Not Political Pundits Ron Paul Gives a Guided Tour of His Navajo Art Collection Classic Nursery Rhymes, Updated and Revamped for the Recession, As Told to Me By My Father And much more!

Bob Odenkirk is a legend in the comedy-writing world, winning Emmys and acclaim for his work on Saturday Night Live, Mr. Show with Bob and David, and many other seminal TV shows. This book, his first, is a spleen-bruisingly funny omnibus that ranges from absurdist monologues (“Martin Luther King, Jr’s Worst Speech Ever”) to intentionally bad theater (“Hitler Dinner Party: A Play”); from avant-garde fiction (“Obituary for the Creator of Madlibs”) to free-verse poetry that's funnier and more powerful than the work of Calvin Trillin, Jewel, and Robert Louis Stevenson combined. Odenkirk's debut resembles nothing so much as a hilarious new sketch comedy show that’s exclusively available as a streaming video for your mind. As Odenkirk himself writes in “The Second Coming of Jesus and Lazarus,” it is a book “to be read aloud to yourself in the voice of Bob Newhart.”

With pathos and insight, each of the sixteen accomplished authors—among them Lynn Freed, Karen Bender, May-lee Chai, Gina Frangello, Cris Mazza, and Amina Gautier—featured in Love in the Time of Time’s Up skillfully explores the complexities of desire, intention, and what it means to be a woman in the era of Me Too and Time’s Up. From the fraught, sexually charged groves of academia and elevators of corporate America, to the imagined diary entries of Brett Kavanaugh and the tragicomic travails of a woman swiping right on Tinder in order to dispense advice to men whose profiles she finds lacking, these stories offer a blend of humor and horror, victory and heartache, righteous anger and rueful recrimination. It’s a collection that’s sure to leave a mark on readers’ minds—and earn a place in their hearts.

As John Hodgman says in this book's introduction, “We all know that books are funny. First, they are made of paste and cloth, which is funny, as is the fact that people still buy and read them.” With that in mind, the McSweeney's Joke Book of Book Jokes collects the best book-related humor from the humor-laden archives of McSweeney's Internet Tendency. Open it and be regaled by such sketches, lists, letters, and spoofs as: Postcards from James Joyce to his Brother Stan Winnie-the-Pooh is My Coworker Ikea Product or Lord of the Rings Character? Popular Children's Fairy Tales Reimagined Using Members of My Family The Very Unauthorized Biography of Steven Seagal Chuck Norris Erotica John Updike, Television Writer Jane Eyre Runs for President Cormac McCarthy Writes to the Editor of the Santa Fe New Mexican Holden Caulfield Gives the Commencement Speech to a High School Letters from Odysseus's College Roommate And many dozens more.

Ever since John Hancock broke into song after signing the Declaration of Independence, American politics and musicals have been inextricably linked. From Alexander Hamilton's jazz hands, to Chester A. Arthur's oboe operas, to Newt Gingrich's off-Broadway sexscapade, You, Me, and My Moon Colony Mistress Makes Three, government and musical theater have joined forces to document our nation's long history of freedom, partisanship, and dancers on roller skates pretending to be choo choo trains. To celebrate this grand union of entrenched bureaucracy and song, the patriots at McSweeney's Internet Tendency (“The Iowa Caucus of humor websites”) offer this riotous collection (peacefully assembled!) of monologues, charts, scripts, lists, diatribes, AND musicals written by the noted fake-musical lyricist, Ben Greenman. On the agenda are . . . Fragments from PALIN! THE MUSICAL Barack Obama’s Undersold 2012 Campaign Slogans Atlas Shrugged Updated for the Financial Crisis Your Attempts to Legislate Hunting Man for Sport Reek of Class Warfare A 1980s Teen Sex Comedy Becomes Politically Uncomfortable Donald Rumsfeld Memoir Chapter Title Or German Heavy Metal Song? Noises Political Pundits Would Make If They Were Wild Animals and Not Political Pundits Ron Paul Gives a Guided Tour of His Navajo Art Collection Classic Nursery Rhymes, Updated and Revamped for the Recession, As Told to Me By My Father And much more!

Rerun Era is a captivating, propulsive memoir about growing up in the environmentally and economically devastated rural flatlands of Oklahoma, the entwinement of personal memory and the memory of popular culture, and a family thrown into trial by lost love and illness that found common ground in the television. Told from the magnetic perspective of Joanna Howard's past selves from the late '70s and early '80s, Rerun Era circles the fascinating psyches of her part-Cherokee teamster truck-driving father, her women's libber mother, and her skateboarder, rodeo bull-riding teenage brother. Illuminating to our rural American present, and the way popular culture portrays the rural American past, Rerun Era perfectly captures the irony of growing up in rural America in the midst of nationalistic fantasies of small town local sheriffs and saloon girls, which manifested the urban cowboy, wild west theme-parks, and The Beverly Hillbillies. Written in stunning, lyric prose, Rerun Era gives humanity, perspective, humor, and depth to an often invisible part of this country, and firmly establishes Howard as an urgent and necessary voice in American letters.

Archived in a folder on award-winning author Alejandro Zambra's desktop are 11 stories of liars and ghosts, armed bandits and young lovers. Intimate, mysterious, and uncanny, these stories reveal a mind that is as undeniably singular as it is universal. Together, they constitute the debut short-story collection from Zambra, whose first novel was heralded as a “bloodletting in Chilean literature.” Whether chronicling the return of a mercurial godson or the disappearance of a trusted cousin, the worlds of these stories are so powerful and deep that the works might better be described as brief novels. My Documents is by turns hilarious and heart-stopping, tragic and tender, but most of all, it is unflinchingly human and essential evidence of a sublimely talented writer working at the height of his powers.