The lord of snark, Lawrence Dorfman, is back! With this treasury of backhanded compliments, sarcastic insults, and catty comebacks, Dorfman gives us transformative wisdom that’s sure to change your life—or at least induce a light chuckle. One question plagues us all: How do we survive all the Sturm und Drang of everyday life? The answer is but one word: snark. “She wears her clothes as if they were thrown on by a pitchfork.” —Jonathan Swift “Why don’t you get a haircut? You look like a chrysanthemum.” —P. G. Wodehouse “He’s a mental midget with the IQ of a fence post.” —Tom Waits “They hardly make ’em like him anymore—but just to be on the safe side, he should be castrated anyway.” —Hunter S. Thompson “He has a Teflon brain . . . nothing sticks” —Lily Tomlin “He has no more backbone than a chocolate éclair.” —Theodore Roosevelt Snark will keep the wolves at bay (or at least out on the porch). Snark, much like a double scotch, will help you deal with relatives, shopping, and rudeness; it is an outlet for the unleashed vitriolic bile that’s saved itself up over the months. Like a shield, it will protect you while you go about your life. Snark is your answer!

"The lord of snark, Lawrence Dorfman, is back! With his treasury of backhanded compliments, sarcastic insults, and catty comebacks, Dorfman gives us transformative wisdom that's sure to change your life--or at least induce a light chuckle,"--front flap of dust jacket.

This lively collection provides hours of entertainment and captures the current era of snarky humor--usually at someone else's expense.

The beloved "Snark Handbook" is back in a new edition--making readers smarterand, more importantly, better than everyone else.

What is snark? You recognize it when you see it -- a tone of teasing, snide, undermining abuse, nasty and knowing, that is spreading like pinkeye through the media and threatening to take over how Americans converse with each other and what they can count on as true. Snark attempts to steal someone's mojo, erase her cool, annihilate her effectiveness. In this sharp and witty polemic, New Yorker critic and bestselling author David Denby takes on the snarkers, naming the nine principles of snark -- the standard techniques its practitioners use to poison their arrows. Snarkers like to think they are deploying wit, but mostly they are exposing the seethe and snarl of an unhappy country, releasing bad feeling but little laughter. In this highly entertaining essay, Denby traces the history of snark through the ages, starting with its invention as personal insult in the drinking clubs of ancient Athens, tracking its development all the way to the age of the Internet, where it has become the sole purpose and style of many media, political, and celebrity Web sites. Snark releases the anguish of the dispossessed, envious, and frightened; it flows when a dying class of the powerful struggles to keep the barbarians outside the gates, or, alternately, when those outsiders want to take over the halls of the powerful and expel the office-holders. Snark was behind the London-based magazine Private Eye, launched amid the dying embers of the British empire in 1961; it was also central to the career-hungry, New York-based magazine Spy. It has flourished over the years in the works of everyone from the startling Roman poet Juvenal to Alexander Pope to Tom Wolfe to a million commenters snarling at other people behind handles. Thanks to the grand dame of snark, it has a prominent place twice a week on the opinion page of the New York Times. Denby has fun snarking the snarkers, expelling the bums and promoting the true wits, but he is also making a serious point: the Internet has put snark on steroids. In politics, snark means the lowest, most insinuating and insulting side can win. For the young, a savage piece of gossip could ruin a reputation and possibly a future career. And for all of us, snark just sucks the humor out of life. Denby defends the right of any of us to be cruel, but shows us how the real pros pull it off. Snark, he says, is for the amateurs.

From the author of the bestselling Snark series comes the premiere guide to satire, sneering, jeering, and mockery in their finest forms. A surviving knight of many a verbal joust, Larry Dorfman has become an expert at backhanded sass and cathartic banter. Featuring life lessons from the master himself, as well as quotes and quips by some of history’s sarcastic greats, The Sarcasm Handbook teaches readers how to deflect stupidity and express their inner dissatisfaction with a keen sensibility, hushing subtlety, and wisecrack wit. Included in these invaluable teachings are chapters on achieving the right tone, sarcastic bastards in history, as well as scenarios depicting some of the greatest moments in sarcasm. So pick up your copy today and start learning the art of disparagement through passive aggressiveness!

Controversial evangelical Bible scholar, popular blogger and podcast host of The Bible for Normal People, and author of The Bible Tells Me So and The Sin of Certainty explains that the Bible is not an instruction manual or rule book but a powerful learning tool that nurtures our spiritual growth by refusing to provide us with easy answers but instead forces us to acquire wisdom. For many Christians, the Bible is a how-to manual filled with literal truths about belief that must be strictly followed. But the Bible is not static, Peter Enns argues. It does not hold easy answers to the perplexing questions and issues that confront us in our daily lives. Rather, the Bible is a dynamic instrument for study that not only offers an abundance of insights but provokes us to find our own answers to spiritual questions, cultivating God’s wisdom within us. “The Bible becomes a confusing mess when we expect it to function as a rulebook for faith. But when we allow the Bible to determine our expectations, we see that Wisdom, not answers, is the Bible’s true subject matter,” writes Enns. This distinction, he points out, is important because when we come to the Bible expecting it to be a textbook intended by God to give us unwavering certainty about our faith, we are actually creating problems for ourselves. The Bible, in other words, really isn’t the problem; having the wrong expectation is what interferes with our reading. Rather than considering the Bible as an ancient book weighed down with problems, flaws, and contradictions that must be defended by modern readers, Enns offers a vision of the holy scriptures as an inspired and empowering resource to help us better understand how to live as a person of faith today. How the Bible Actually Works makes clear that there is no one right way to read the Bible. Moving us beyond the damaging idea that “being right” is the most important measure of faith, Enns’s freeing approach to Bible study helps us to instead focus on pursuing enlightenment and building our relationship with God—which is exactly what the Bible was designed to do.