Dirty Jokes Your Mother Told Me is a collection of short fiction that is sure to be the funniest and most bizarre book you pick up this year. Dirty Jokes is a compilation of 39 comedic pieces that will climb deep inside of your body cavity and make you laugh from places you never thought possible. How it gets in there is up to you. If you are a fan of Steve Martin's Cruel Shoes and Pure Drivel, then you will love this book. Dirty Jokes is like their ugly baby that went off its medication. In Dirty Jokes Your Mother Told Me, a time traveler is doomed to repeatedly visit the moment of his own conception. An out-of-work hospital custodian misunderstands the meaning of the term "flash mob" and attacks a group of dancers. Bernie Madoff steals a cab from a baby and tries to turn the ocean into condos. Dirty Jokes Your Mother Told Me: A Collection of Short-Ass Fiction was penned by D.M. Engel, the author of the best-selling books Obama Blade: Revenge of the First Black/Robot President, How to Monetize Your Children, Taint Farm, and A Pictoral History of Washcloths. In truth, he is a writer in New York City and the co-host of the podcast, White Dad Problems (whitedadproblems.com). Audio and video clips of Dirty Jokes can be found on its Facebook page, and more of D.M.'s writing and podcasts can be found at dmengel.com. "I loved it." --Jenny Lawson, The Bloggess

If you think Joan Rivers said funny, outrageous, and ridiculous things ONSTAGE, wait ’til you read the funny, outrageous, and ridiculous things she said OFFSTAGE…things that will make you laugh out loud…and keep Melissa in therapy for the foreseeable future. The only thing my mother loved more than making people laugh was lying…or as she’d say, “embellishing.” Her motto was: “Why let the truth ruin a good story?” This book contains some of those stories. ***************** “When Joan told a story, the truth disappeared faster than I did.” — Jimmy Hoffa “If you thought Dante’s Inferno was hot, read Lies My Mother Told Me; it’s a five-alarmer.” — Dante’s second wife, Allie “Twelve of my twenty-six personalities loved this book.” — Sybil “The words on the page absolutely crackle and spark; I burned my fingers reading it!” — Annie Sullivan “The Bible may be the good book, but Lies My Mother Told Me is way funnier.” — Matthew 2:14 The Jets. 7 “Lies My Mother Told Me is the feel-good book of 2022.” — Torquemada “All’s not well that ends well. I’ve had massages with happier endings.” — Wm. Shakespeare “Melissa, I don’t care what your mother said in this book, I LOVE your bangs.” — Mamie Eisenhower “Lies My Mother Told Me is so funny even those ‘woke’ m***********s will laugh.” — Lenny Bruce

When Ketzel WeinrachÕs beloved brother Potsie goes missing in Las Vegas, she not only must try to find him, she must confront her familyÕs shady history and their ties to the legendary Jewish mob, Murder, Inc., as well as her troubling relationship to her cousin Perry (who runs a strip club on the outskirts of Vegas), her long and apparently not-so-loving marriage to her recently departed husband Morty Tittelman (a self-styled professor of dirty jokes and erotic folklore), and her own failed career as a stand-up comic.

This collection of papers celebrates the work of Jeanette K. Gundel, who has contributed to the field of the grammar-pragmatics interface through her publications on the syntactic realization of topic and comment and the cognitive status of referring expressions, as well as by inspiring colleagues to make contributions to the overall field of pragmatics. This volume collects together papers from colleagues and former students on pragmatics and syntax, pragmatics and reference, and pragmatics and social variables. The volume includes papers devoted to explicating the grammar-pragmatics interface, with the focus of the papers ranging from Gricean and post-Gricean pragmatics, construction grammar, and genre theory to formal semantics, as well as papers devoted to expanding on Gundel's own original approach to factors such as the cognitive status decisions underlying speakers' choice of referring expression and the topic and focus decisions underlying speakers' choice of syntactic construction.

The complete plays of Shakespeare are often considered among the greatest works in all of English literature. Replete with great characters, from the portly and funny Falstaff to the hesitative and obsessive Hamlet, the plays present us with the entire gamut of human personality. They give us an unparalleled look at love and humour, death and tragedy, history and magic. These plays represent the peak of genius and art from the English language's greatest writer.

An “irresistible” collection of short fiction by an author who “has been likened to everyone from J. D. Salinger to Woody Allen” (The New York Times Book Review). Hailed by Newsweek as “a bona fide literary event,” The Collected Short Fiction of Bruce Jay Friedman brings together dozens of the New York Times–bestselling author’s greatest stories, which originally appeared in Esquire, The New Yorker, and other magazines. “Readers who feel short stories are too high-flown—too literary, arcane, and serious—will find counterbalance in Friedman, whose stories have uncomplicated structures, obvious gists, intelligible metaphors, and unambiguous endings and come wrapped in humor. This compilation of his output in the short story form between 1953 and 1995 has a thematic arrangement, with categories such as ‘Mother,’ ‘Crazed Youth,’ and ‘Sex.’ Some of the more outstanding pieces are ‘The Subversive,’ about the narrator’s air force buddy whom the narrator believed to be the most all-American guy he ever met until his friend commits a crazed act; ‘The Gent,’ concerning a man who succumbs to a seduction by his best friend’s daughter; and ‘The Night Boxing Ended,’ in which ringside heckling goes way out of bounds.” —Booklist “From poignant bildungsroman to sly satire, from wicked comedy to surrealistic farce, this virtuosic collection covers more than four decades’ worth of short stories . . . Friedman explores themes such as loneliness, aging, fear, parenthood and ethnicity, spinning tales in an expertly modulated voice.” —Publishers Weekly “Friedman [is] more interesting than most of Malamud, Roth, and Bellow . . . What makes him more important is that he writes out of the viscera instead of the cerebrum.” —Nelson Algren, The Nation “Pure delight.” —Newsday