Other books that might interest you

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  Le Glitch

  Philip Ogley

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  Jean Marc Bulot is the Mayor of Crêpe, a French village a million miles from nowhere. Where you can’t even get a baguette, let alone a beer. His only real companions: an alcoholic ex-miner, a pedantic village secretary, a 92-year-old retired school teacher, and an idle janitor. It's the stuff of nightmares. Only this is real. Welcome to Crêpe. Then one day a car arrives. And another. Then another. All lost. All hungry. All in need of a drink. Suddenly everyone is coming to Crêpe. But why?

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  Acharnians (Billson Translation)

  Aristophanes

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  Loaded with cryptic, nearly indecipherable inside jokes and double entendres, this early comedy of Aristophanes has a simple, anti-war premise that resounds down the centuries. On flimsy pretexts, greedy politicians have embroiled the nation of Athens in war after war after war. Dicæopolis is Everyman, an ordinary, plain-speaking citizen fed up with the bumbling, belligerence, and insincerity of the professional leaders. He decides on a whim to make a separate peace with Sparta all by himself, returning with a treaty good for thirty years. Envious of the good deal he has made and of the profit he sees from it, other Athenians try to buy packets of his peace from him, with no success. Puffed up with his own cleverness, Dicæopolis spends the final scenes of the play ridiculing the muscle-brained neanderthal General Lamachus for faux patriotism and comic chest-beating heroism.This translation is by Charles James Billson, who admits in his preface with obvious regret that the chilling effect of “modern Protestantism” had forced him to prune out the more risque and bawdy bits of Aristophanes’s lines, particularly most of the “Phallic Hymn.” He tries to make up for this unfortunate lack, however, by filling the play with rhyme patterns and slang borrowed from the “burlesque” halls of the 1880s, hoping to render the difficult Greek humor into the form of “a lively acting play.”( Expatriate)

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  The CEO of the Sofa

  P.J. O'Rourke

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  Experience a year in the life of a cranky couch potato—also known as “the funniest writer in America” (The Wall Street Journal).   Touching on topics from technological change to the United Nations, this is a chronicle of the day-to-day home life and frequent harangues of a New York Times–bestselling humorist. Over the course of the year, in between rants, he does occasionally leave the sofa and embark on exotic adventures—including a blind (drunk) wine tasting with Christopher Buckley, and a Motel 6 where he has twenty-eight channels and a bathroom to himself. As readers of Parliament of Whores, Give War a Chance, and his other bestsellers know, P. J. O’Rourke takes no prisoners—though he may take a few naps.   “An entertaining and engaging read.” —Associated Press   “A wide-angled worldview from his own living room, his salon of sarcasm. He introduces readers to his assistant, friends, family and smart-aleck babysitter . . . His vitriolic wit is couched in humor that elicits the gamut from giggles to guffaws.” —Publishers Weekly

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  Beirut Hellfire Society - A Novel

  Rawi Hage

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  On a ravaged street overlooking a cemetery in Beirut's Christian enclave, we meet an eccentric young man named Pavlov, the son of a local undertaker. When his father meets a sudden and untimely death, Pavlov is approached by a colorful member of the mysterious Hellfire Society—an anti-religious sect that, among many rebellious and often salacious activities, arranges secret burial for outcasts who have been denied last rites because of their religion or sexuality. 
  Pavlov agrees to take on his father's work for the society, and over the course of the novel he becomes a survivor-chronicler of his embattled and fading community at the heart of Lebanon's civil war. His new role introduces him to an unconventional cast of characters, including a father searching for his son's body, a mysterious woman who takes up residence on Pavlov's stairs after a bombing, and the flamboyant head of the Hellfire Society, El-Marquis. 
  Deftly combining comedy with tragedy, gritty reality with surreal absurdity, Beirut Hellfire Society asks: What, after all, can be preserved in the face of certain change and imminent death? The answer is at once propulsive, elegiac, outrageous, profane, and transcendent—and a profoundly moving fable on what it means to live through war.

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  Kerryoans up the Clyde! - It...

  Allan Morrison

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  'If the Waverley sank right now and I wanted to swim to the nearest land, how far would that be?' 'About a hundred yards, sur.' 'Amazing. Which way?' 'Down!'
  
  True 'Glesca' humour and history combined, Kerryoans up the Clyde! recounts the adventures of a vessel full of character with a captain to match: Morrison's Waverley and 'Big Lizzie' are each as formidable and inalienably Scottish as the other.
  
  Morrison captures the charmingly unique spirit of the last of the Clyde's paddle steamers as well as the facts of its history. Full of playful tales, many a chuckle and the quirky illustrations of Bob Dewar, you're sure to find something that floats your boat!

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  The Dada Caper

  Ross H. Spencer

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  “The hero is a private eye who is always tailing the wrong people and hitting the wrong guys. The Dada Caper is wild, shrewd, mad and unexpectedly funny” (The New York Times).   Chance Purdue may be better at a lot of things than he is at detecting, but he’s the only man for the job when the FBI comes looking for someone to take on the Soviet-inspired DADA (Destroy America, Destroy America) conspiracy.   Plus, he needs a paycheck. Chance gets off to a rough start as he’s led on a merry chase through Chicago’s underbelly and drawn into a case of deception that can only be solved with the help of a mysterious femme fatale who’s as beautiful as she is cunning.

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