When Harold Ross founded The New Yorker in 1925, he called it a “comic weekly.” And although it has become much more than that, it has remained true in its irreverent heart to the founder’s description, publishing the most illustrious literary humorists in the modern era—among them Robert Benchley, Dorothy Parker, Groucho Marx, James Thurber, S. J. Perelman, Mike Nichols, Woody Allen, Calvin Trillin, Garrison Keillor, Ian Frazier, Roy Blount, Jr., Steve Martin, and Christopher Buckley. Fierce Pajamas is a treasury of laughter from the magazine W. H. Auden called the “best comic magazine in existence.”

Critical studies attempting to define and dissect American humor have been published steadily for nearly one hundred years. However, until now, key documents from that history have never been brought together in a single volume for students and scholars. What's So Funny? Humor in American Culture, a collection of 15 essays, examines the meaning of humor and attempts to pinpoint its impact on American culture and society, while providing a historical overview of its progres-sion. Essays from Nancy Walker and Zita Dresner, Joseph Boskin and Joseph Dorinson, William Keough, Roy Blount, Jr., and others trace the development of American humor from the colonial period to the present, focusing on its relationship with ethnicity, gender, violence, and geography. An excellent reader for courses in American studies and American social and cultural history, What's So Funny? explores the traits of the American experience that have given rise to its humor.

Here is a richly detailed and vivid biography of the man who wrote 'Charlotte's Web', 'The Trumpet of the Swan', and 'Stuart Little'; the writer whose style and humor were so important in distinguishing 'The New Yorker's' first thirty years. Included are some photographs and drawings, as well as manuscript facsimiles.

This work is the fifth volume in the series, The History of American Journalism. By 1906, the nation included 45 states connected by railroads, steamships, wagon trails, the postal system, the telegraph, and the press. The continuing trends of migration and immigration into the cities supported the publication of more newspapers than at any time in the history of the country. From coast to coast, newsgathering agencies knit thousands of local newspapers into the fabric of the nation and larger metropolitan papers routinely considered the relevancy of distant news.

The New Yorker is, of course, a bastion of superb essays, influential investigative journalism, and insightful arts criticism. But for eighty years it’s also been a hoot. Now an uproarious sampling of its funny writings can be found in this collection, by turns satirical and witty, misanthropic and menacing. From the 1920s onward—but with a special focus on the latest generation—here are the humorists who have set the pace and stirred the pot, pulled the leg and pinched the behind of America. The comic lineup includes Christopher Buckley, Ian Frazier, Veronica Geng, Garrison Keillor, Steve Martin, Susan Orlean, Simon Rich, David Sedaris, Calvin Trillin, and many others. If laughter is the best medicine, Disquiet, Please! is truly a wonder drug.

An essential tool for assisting leisure readers interested in topics surrounding food, this unique book contains annotations and read-alikes for hundreds of nonfiction titles about the joys of comestibles and cooking. Food Lit: A Reader's Guide to Epicurean Nonfiction provides a much-needed resource for librarians assisting adult readers interested in the topic of food—a group that is continuing to grow rapidly. Containing annotations of hundreds of nonfiction titles about food that are arranged into genre and subject interest categories for easy reference, the book addresses a diversity of reading experiences by covering everything from foodie memoirs and histories of food to extreme cuisine and food exposés. Author Melissa Stoeger has organized and described hundreds of nonfiction titles centered on the themes of food and eating, including life stories, history, science, and investigative nonfiction. The work emphasizes titles published in the past decade without overlooking significant benchmark and classic titles. It also provides lists of suggested read-alikes for those titles, and includes several helpful appendices of fiction titles featuring food, food magazines, and food blogs.

When the stock market crashes on the Thursday before Easter, you—an ambitious, although ineffectual and not entirely ethical young broker—are convinced that you’re facing the Weekend from Hell. Before the market reopens on Monday, you’re going to have to scramble and scheme to cover your butt, but there’s no way you can anticipate the baffling disappearance of a 300-pound psychic, the fall from grace of a born-again monkey, or the intrusion in your life of a tattooed stranger intent on blowing your mind and most of your fuses. Over these fateful three days, you will be forced to confront everything from mysterious African rituals to legendary amphibians, from tarot-card bombshells to street violence, from your own sexuality to outer space. This is, after all, a Tom Robbins novel—and the author has never been in finer form.