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Unbelievable!
by Paul JenningsBelieve it or not - a kid can grow younger, birds can bury you, ghosts have exams, and there are eyes in the milk. This is another collection of crazy, creepy stories from Paul Jennings.
Tom Gates, Book 9: Top of the Class (nearly) (PDF)
by Liz PichonThe ninth amazing installment of this brilliant series! Tips for being top of the class (sadly. . . I did none of these things): 1. Stay awake in lessons (it helps) 2. Don't draw hilarious pictures of your teachers. 3. Avoid the class bully to stay out of trouble. 4. Don't let Mum and Dad write anything in your school planner. 5. Don't let your grumpy sister Delia boss you around. (Technically not a school issue - but still important.) I'm trying to get voted onto the school council as well - but thanks to the above list it's not exactly going to plan.
Unbelievable!
by Paul JenningsBelieve it or not - a kid can grow younger, birds can bury you, ghosts have exams, and there are eyes in the milk. This is another collection of crazy, creepy stories from Paul Jennings.
Master Crook's Crime Academy: Robbery For Rascals (PDF)
by Terry DearyAfter sending dozens of innocent people to jail, cruel Judge Fumble decides to rest at his country mansion. But he must ensure that the Fumble fortune remains safe on the journey home. . . On the other side of town, the students of the world's first crime academy are getting set for another lesson in crime-this time from the greatest highway robber Wildpool has ever seen. Books this funny should be against the law!
Cousin Betty
by Honoré De BalzacLa Cousine Bette (French pronunciation: [la kuzin bɛt], Cousin Bette) is an 1846 novel by French author Honoré de Balzac. Set in mid-19th century Paris, it tells the story of an unmarried middle-aged woman who plots the destruction of her extended family. Bette works with Valérie Marneffe, an unhappily married young lady, to seduce and torment a series of men. One of these is Baron Hector Hulot, husband to Bette's cousin Adeline. He sacrifices his family's fortune and good name to please Valérie, who leaves him for a tradesman named Crevel. The book is part of the Scènes de la vie parisienne section of Balzac's novel sequence La Comédie humaine ("The Human Comedy").
Cousin Pons
by Honoré De BalzacMild, harmless and ugly to behold, the impoverished Pons is an ageing musician whose brief fame has fallen to nothing. Living a placid Parisian life as a bachelor in a shared apartment with his friend Schmucke, he maintains only two passions: a devotion to fine dining in the company of wealthy but disdainful relatives, and a dedication to the collection of antiques. When these relatives become aware of the true value of his art collection, however, their sneering contempt for the parasitic Pons rapidly falls away as they struggle to obtain a piece of the weakening man's inheritance. Taking its place in the Human Comedy as a companion to Cousin Bette, the darkly humorous Cousin Pons is among of the last and greatest of Balzac's novels concerning French urban society: a cynical, pessimistic but never despairing consideration of human nature.
Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic
by Henri BergsonIn this great philosophical essay, Henri Bergson explores why people laugh and what laughter means. Written at the turn of the twentieth century, Laughter explores what it is in language that makes a joke funny and what it is in us that makes us laugh. One of the functions of humor, according to Bergson, is to help us retain our humanity during an age of mechanization. Like other philosophers, novelists, poets, and humorists of his era, Bergson was concerned with the duality of man and machine. His belief in life as a vital impulse, indefinable by reason alone, informs his perception of comedy as the relief we experience upon distancing ourselves from the mechanistic and materialistic. "A situation is always comic," Bergson notes, "if it participates simultaneously in two series of events which are absolutely independent of each other, and if it can be interpreted in two quite different meanings. " The philosopher's thought-provoking insights (e. g. , "It seems that laughter needs an echo. Our laughter is always the laughter of a group. ") keep this work ever-relevant as a thesis on the principles of humor.
Creatures That Once Were Men
by Maksim GorkyA collection of short stories by the popular and influential Russian author, a founder of the socialist realism literary method and arguably the greatest Russian literary figure of the 20th century. He wrote stories, plays, memoirs and novels which touched the imagination of the Russian people, and was the first Russian author to write sympathetically of such characters as tramps and thieves, emphasizing their daily struggles against overwhelming odds.
Crome Yellow
by Aldous HuxleyCrome Yellow is in the tradition of the English country house novel, as practised by Thomas Love Peacock, in which a diverse group of characters descend upon an estate to leech off the host. They spend most of their time eating, drinking, and holding forth on their personal intellectual conceits.
Crotchet Castle
by Thomas Love PeacockCrotchet Castle (1831), his sixth novel, contains all the humour and social satire for which Peacock is famous. Its lively farce is more ambitious than that of the earlier works in its range of cultural and intellectual targets, including progressivism, dogmatism, liberalism, sexism, mass education and the idiocies of the learned. The book constitutes an artistic, political and philosophical miscellany of sorts, thematically unified in its satirical emphasis on folly and dispute – and on the folly of dispute itself.
Daddy Long-Legs: A Comedy in Four Acts
by Jean WebsterA trustee of the John Grier orphanage has offered to send Judy Abbott to college. The only requirements are that she must write to him every month and that she can never know who he is. Judy's life at college is a whirlwind of friends, classes, parties and a growing friendship with the handsome Jervis Pendleton. With so much happening in her life, Judy can scarcely stop writing to 'Daddy-Long-Legs', or wondering who her mysterious benefactor is...
Cyrano de Bergerac: An Heroic Comedy in Five Acts
by Edmond RostandIn Paris, in the year 1640, a brilliant poet and swordsman named Cyrano de Bergerac finds himself deeply in love with his beautiful, intellectual cousin Roxane.
Cynthia's Revels; Or, The Fountain of Self-Love
by Ben JonsonThe play begins with three pages disputing over the black cloak usually worn by the actor who delivers the prologue. They draw lots for the cloak, and one of the losers, Anaides, starts telling the audience what happens in the play to come; the others try to suppress him, interrupting him and putting their hands over his mouth. Soon they are fighting over the cloak and criticizing the author and the spectators as well. In the play proper, the goddess Diana, also called Cynthia, has ordained a "solemn revels" in the valley of Gargaphie in Greece. The gods Cupid and Mercury appear, and they too start to argue. Mercury has awakened Echo, who weeps for Narcissus, and states that a drink from Narcissus's spring causes the drinkers to "Grow dotingly enamored of themselves." The courtiers and ladies assembled for the Cynthia's revels all drink from the spring.
Danny's Own Story
by Don MarquisThe 1912 publication of Don Marquis’ first book, the novel “Danny’s Own Story,” created a stir in literary circles. Doubleday, Page & Co., Don’s publisher, heralded the young writer as a rising star, and reviewers favorably compared him with Mark Twain, who had died less than two year earlier. (It didn’t hurt that “Danny’s Own Story” bore a passing resemblance to “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.” Both were written in a backwoods vernacular and both used wry humor to tell the adventures of young boys, one an orphan and the other nearly so, who ran away from home and lived by their wits.)
Dawn O'Hara: The Girl Who Laughed
by Edna FerberThis is the story of Dawn O'Hara, who finds the humor in things. She's charming and witty and stubborn and likable. It's her tale of struggle with romance, growing friendships and relationships, sacrifices and overcoming her past and embracing the future.
Days with Sir Roger De Coverley
by Joseph Addison Sir Richard SteeleAn English squire of Queen Anne's reign, Sir Roger exemplified the values of an old country gentleman, and was portrayed as lovable but somewhat ridiculous ('rather beloved than esteemed'), making his Tory politics seem harmless but silly. He was said to be the grandson of the man who invented the dance.
Love Among the Chickens
by P. G. WodehouseAfter seeing his friend Stanley Featherstonehaugh Ukridge for the first time in years, Jeremy Garnet is dragged along on holiday to Ukridge's new chicken farm in Dorset. Hilarious situations abound with Garnet's troublesome courting of a girl living nearby and the struggles on the farm, which are worsened by Ukridge's bizarre business ideas and methods. This was Wodehouse's first novel published in the United States, and the only one to feature the recurring character Stanley Featherstonehaugh Ukridge.
Love for Love: A Comedy
by William CongreveValentine has fallen under the displeasure of his father by his extravagance, and is besieged by creditors. His father, Sir Sampson Legend, offers him enough to pay his debts if he will sign a bond engaging to make over his right to his inheritance to his younger brother Ben. Valentine, to escape from his embarrassment, signs the bond. He is in love with Angelica, who possesses a fortune of her own, but so far she has not yielded to his suit. Sir Sampson has arranged a match between Ben, who is at sea, and Miss Prue, an awkward country girl, the daughter of Foresight, a superstitious old fool who claims to be an astrologer.
Diary of a Pilgrimage
by Jerome K. JeromeThis is a sensible book. I want you to understand that. This is a book to improve your mind. In this book I tell you all about Germany--at all events, all I know about Germany--and the Ober-Ammergau Passion Play. I also tell you about other things. I do not tell you all I know about all these other things, because I do not want to swamp you with knowledge. I wish to lead you gradually. When you have learnt this book, you can come again, and I will tell you some more.
Desperate Deserts (PDF)
by Anita Ganeri Mike PhillipsGeography with the gritty bits left in! Where in the world can you: Spot sand dunes that bury whole villages? Discover some deadly desert wildlife? Follow in the footsteps of daring desert explorers?
Super Good Skills (PDF)
by Liz PichonLook out! Tom, Delia and the whole Gates family are going on holiday. How will Tom manage to keep himself busy on the most boring campsite ever? By doodling, of course! An exciting new story - with doodle your own elements! - from award-winning and best-selling author Liz Pichon.
The Devil's Dictionary
by Ambrose BierceThe Devil's Dictionary is a satirical dictionary written by American journalist and author Ambrose Bierce. Originally published in 1906 as The Cynic's Word Book, it features Bierce's witty and often ironic spin on many common English words. Retitled in 1911, it has been followed by numerous "unabridged" versions compiled after Bierce's death, which include definitions absent from earlier editions.
Getting The Joke: The Inner Workings Of Stand-up Comedy (PDF)
by Oliver Double'This is the kind of book that troubles grey-suited committees of academic peers. It's too enjoyable. But that, given its subject, is just what it ought to be, and it treats that subject seriously . . . There isn't a "dull" page anywhere in the book. ' ? Professor Peter Thomson, Studies in Theatre and Performance Comedy is changing: stand-up comedians routinely sell out stadia, their audience-figures swollen by panel-show appearances and much-followed Twitter feeds. Meanwhile, the smaller clubs are filling up, with audiences as well as aspirants. How can we make sense of it all? This new edition of Getting the Joke gives an insider's look at the spectrum of modern comedy, re-examining the world of stand-up in the internet age. Drawing on his acclaimed first edition, Oliver Double focuses in greater detail on the US scene and its comedians (such as David Cross, Sarah Silverman, Louis CK, Demetri Martin and Margaret Cho); the 'DIY' comedy circuit and its celebrated apostles and visionaries, from Josie Long to Stewart Lee; the growing importance of the solo stand-up show; the role played by Twitter (including an interview with the organiser of the world's first comedy gig on Twitter), and the driving force that is the TV guest slot, be it on Mock the Week or Live at the Apollo. With expanded sections on joke construction, as well as ways to challenge the audience, and a host of new and updated exercises to guide the aspiring comedian, this new edition of Getting the Joke is the only book to combine the history of stand-up comedy with an analysis of the elements and methods that go into its creation. Featuring a range of interviews with working comedians ? from circuit veterans to new kids on the block ? combined with the author's vast experience, this is a must read for any aspiring stand-up comedian.