Showing results by publisher "Phoenix Books" in Literature & Fiction

The Expo begins with a literal bang: a bomb wrecks the hotel, killing a housekeeper and causing extensive damage. Luckily for Pickax, Qwill is on the scene, his moustache twitching with suspicions that this bomb was intended as something stronger than a warning to someone. His evidence: Koko and Yum Yum's new interest in cheese, especially Gruyere, Brie and Feta. Qwill and the Siamese are on a case that will demand all their feline intuition and mustachioed insight!

In vignettes both comic and sexy, the owner of a coffee shop recalls the day his first wife seemed to achieve a moment of simple perfection, while she remembers the women's softball game during which she was stricken by the beauty of the shortstop. A young couple spends hours at the coffee shop fueling the idea of their fierce love. A professor of philosophy, stopping by for a cup of coffee, makes a valiant attempt to explain what he knows to be the inexplicable workings of the human heart.

Penniless and downtrodden at the loss of his wife and one of his daughters, Samuel Clemens turned to writing. The short stories and essays in Letters from the Earth find Clemens—under the pseudonym of Mark Twain—at perhaps his most quizzical and questioning state ever. Written as diary entries, Twain penned a series of letters from the point of view of a dejected angel on Earth who observes the many curious natures of man. These pieces, gathered by Twain's literary executor, feature sharp takes on the inconsistencies of Christianity and farcical criticisms of American life.

Sissy Hankshaw, an almost flawlessly beautiful small-town girl with big-time dreams, hitchhikes her way into your heart, your hopes, and your sleeping bag in Tom Robbins's magical, funny, and most famous novel. Follow Sissy's amazing odyssey from Virginia to chic Manhattan to the Dakota Badlands, where FBI agents, cowgirls, and ecstatic whooping cranes explode in a deliciously drawn-out climax.

Fed up with the Republican Right? Then you'll love Al Franken's scathingly hilarious look at America's largest talk show host and his conservative cronies. Funny yet uncompromisingly fair, Franken tackles the issues - and the politicians - in ways few have dared.

Without bothering to get approval from the President, the State Department, or even the FTC, Dave Barry's publishers sent him to Tokyo. You'd think they would have known better. Now the word is Barry has set back our diplomatic relations with the whole Pacific Rim by a couple of decades. Japanese culture, dining, sport, and industry all come under Barry's relentless scrutiny.

While sifting through closets of junk in the mansion they have rented, Qwill and Koko uncover a mystery involving the suicide of the former owner and the murder of a potato farmer. By the author of The Cat Who Wasn't There.

Here are the excruciatingly funny adventures of Suzanne Vale — a young film star and drug addict — who survives a rehab clinic only to rejoin the equally harrowing world of Hollywood. Out there on the edge, despair flips into hilarity, and we're left laughing as Suzanne struggles to come to terms with her various fantasylands.

The place: New York. The time: the early 1980s. The scene: the red-hot comedy clubs, very late at night. The cast: five would-be stand-up comics, their egos, and their girls. The result: a downright hilarious novel about trying to be funny for fame, fortune, and fornication. This is Bill Maher's report from the front, a stageside table at the birth of the comedy boom. You'll laugh in all the right places.

Imagine this: 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 must 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.

Dave Barry exposes natural childbirth for what it is: a pop phenomenon of the 1960's that, along with paisley bell-bottoms and creative sideburns, deserves a rest. His new book gives parents-to-be the hard facts they need. He examines the new federal law requiring prospective fathers to free themselves from their self-made macho prison - to laugh, cry, love and just generally behave like certified wimps.

Warning: This isn't the real thing...it's funnier! "Gerber's affectionate, giggle-inducing send-up is one giant step toward restoring the somewhat debased art form known as 'parody,'" says Sean Kelly, former editor of National Lampoon. If you love Harry Potter - or if you have had enough of him! - you've gotta hear this.

America's most beloved writer, Lilian Jackson Braun, author of twenty-four Cat Who... mysteries is now the subject of a mystery herself. In this spoof by one of her most ardent admirers, her beheaded body has been discovered in the men's room of a gay bar in Lower Manhattan. The police are baffled, and so it is up to Braun's eccentric writer friend, James Q. (Qafka), and his Siamese cats Ying-Ton and Poon-Tang to solve the ghastly mystery.

In this seventh installment of the Jeeves series, the unflappable butler once again must apply his cleverness to rescue Bertie Wooster—this time from being arrested, lynched, and engaged by mistake! Chaos ensues when Aunt Dahlia demands that Bertie help dupe an antique dealer into selling her an 18th-century cow creamer. Complications grow as Bertie's pal Gussie Fink-Nottle is more interested in studying the effects of a full moon on the love life of newts rather than marrying Madeline Bassett.

An elite plan is afoot, a plan so secret and dangerous that its existence is known only to a tiny group of specialists within the innermost core of the CIA. There is virtually no paper trail—but somehow the plan has sprung a leak, and the plotters must urgently plug it—or face deadly consequences. As clandestine worlds collide, the present faces the past, and disturbing moral choices are weighed against a shining patriotic dream. What is the truth? Whose truth should be believed?

Beautiful, innocent, and generous to a fault, young Candy is thrust into an outrageous world of debauched lechers and dirty old men. Can she close the gap between people by giving fully and satisfying their sizeable needs? Come with Candy on her hilarious misadventures in this raunchy, irreverent, and wildly funny satire of pornography.

What would it take to lure a serious young newswoman from a respectable New England paper to the most notorious supermarket tabloid in America? The call of journalistic adventure? How about a promise of a salary that's triple what she's making? En route to her new job at the Weekly Galaxy, Sara Joslyn stumbles across a bloody corpse in a Buick Riviera. A big story? Not at this paper. The problem is compounded when the dead man vanishes, Buick and all.

The victim of a painful past and a fatherless childhood, Dinah is searching for love that will last—or at least—a reasonable facsimile that comes with a warranty. Two years after the breakup of her marriage to the award-winning playwright, Dinah remains in limbo, not genuinely wanting him back but lacking a satisfying stand-in. She finds it hard to relinquish the "pink" girlish fantasy that a man will secure her happily ever after. When she fights to hold on to that now-extinct romance, Dinah finds herself in a variety of wild predicaments.

One of America's funniest comedians, Carl Reiner, tells of a young man's frustrations as a machinist's helper who tries to break into show business. The semi-autobiographical novel details the bumpy journey as the aspiring actor tries to extricate himself from his overly protective parents—and his two girlfriends. Enter Laughing is a heartwarming, laugh-out-loud, and relatable story of a young man with love in his heart and grease paint on his face—a tale that guarantees to have listeners exit laughing.

Sick of working your way to the top? America's most popular humorist, Dave Barry, shows you the alternate route, giving you tools to become the head of a major corporation in roughly a week. His surefire tips, from what shirt to wear to how to deal with pesky subordinates, will keep you laughing all the way up the corporate ladder.