Recommendations based on "A Lazy Afternoon"

A new collection from David Sedaris is cause for jubilation. His recent move to Paris has inspired hilarious pieces, including Me Talk Pretty One Day, about his attempts to learn French. His family is another inspiration. You Cant Kill the Rooster is a portrait of his brother who talks incessant hip-hop slang to his bewildered father. And no one hones a finer fury in response to such modern annoyances as restaurant meals presented in ludicrous towers and cashiers with 6-inch fingernails. Compared by The New Yorker to Twain and Hawthorne, Sedaris has become one of our best-loved authors. Sedaris is an amazing reader whose appearances draw hundreds, and his performancesincluding a jaw-dropping impression of Billie Holiday singing I wish I were an Oscar Meyer weinerare unforgettable. Sedariss essays on living in Paris are some of the funniest hes ever written. At last, someone even meaner than the French! The sort of blithely sophisticated, loopy humour that might have resulted if Dorothy Parker and James Thurber had had a love child. Entertainment Weekly on Barrel Fever Sidesplitting Not one of the essays in this new collection failed to crack me up; frequently I was helpless. The New York Times Book Review on Naked

In one complete volume, here are the five classic novels from Douglas Adams’s beloved Hitchhiker series. Now celebrating the pivotal 42nd anniversary of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, soon to be a Hulu original series! The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (Nominated as one of America’s best-loved novels by PBS’s The Great American Read) Seconds before the Earth is demolished for a galactic freeway, Arthur Dent is saved by Ford Prefect, a researcher for the revised Guide. Together they stick out their thumbs to the stars and begin a wild journey through time and space. The Restaurant at the End of the Universe The moment before annihilation at the hands of warmongers is a curious time to crave tea. It could only happen to the cosmically displaced Arthur Dent and his comrades as they hurtle across the galaxy in a desperate search for a place to eat. Life, the Universe and Everything The unhappy inhabitants of planet Krikkit are sick of looking at the night sky– so they plan to destroy it. The universe, that is. Now only five individuals can avert Armageddon: mild-mannered Arthur Dent and his stalwart crew. So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish Back on Earth, Arthur Dent is ready to believe that the past eight years were all just a figment of his stressed-out imagination. But a gift-wrapped fishbowl with a cryptic inscription thrusts him back to reality. So to speak. Mostly Harmless Just when Arthur Dent makes the terrible mistake of starting to enjoy life, all hell breaks loose. Can he save the Earth from total obliteration? Can he save the Guide from a hostile alien takeover? Can he save his daughter from herself? Includes the bonus story “Young Zaphod Plays It Safe” “With droll wit, a keen eye for detail and heavy doses of insight . . . Adams makes us laugh until we cry.”—San Diego Union-Tribune “Lively, sharply satirical, brilliantly written . . . ranks with the best set pieces in Mark Twain.”—The Atlantic

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • “Extremely funny . . . inspired lunacy . . . [and] over much too soon.”—The Washington Post Book WorldSOON TO BE A HULU SERIES • Now celebrating the pivotal 42nd anniversary of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy!Nominated as one of America’s best-loved novels by PBS’s The Great American ReadIt’s an ordinary Thursday morning for Arthur Dent . . . until his house gets demolished. The Earth follows shortly after to make way for a new hyperspace express route, and Arthur’s best friend has just announced that he’s an alien.After that, things get much, much worse.With just a towel, a small yellow fish, and a book, Arthur has to navigate through a very hostile universe in the company of a gang of unreliable aliens. Luckily the fish is quite good at languages. And the book is The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy . . . which helpfully has the words DON’T PANIC inscribed in large, friendly letters on its cover.Douglas Adams’s mega-selling pop-culture classic sends logic into orbit, plays havoc with both time and physics, offers up pithy commentary on such things as ballpoint pens, potted plants, and digital watches . . . and, most important, reveals the ultimate answer to life, the universe, and everything.Now, if you could only figure out the question. . . .

Prequel to the best-selling phenomenon Trainspotting, this exhilarating and moving novel shows how Welsh’s colorful miscreants first went wrong. Marked by Irvine Welsh’s scabrous humor and raw Scottish vernacular, Skagboys transports us to 1980s Edinburgh, where the Trainspotting crew is just getting started. Mark Renton has it all: the first in his family to attend university, he has a pretty girlfriend and a great social life. But when economic uncertainties and family problems intervene, Rent succumbs to the defeatism―not to mention the drug use―that has taken hold in Edinburgh’s tougher quarters. His friends are responding according to personality. Laid off, Spud Murphy is paralyzed in the face of long-term unemployment. Sick Boy, supreme manipulator of the opposite sex, is scamming and hustling for money and drugs. And meanwhile, psycho Franco Begbie is scaring the hell out of everyone. Darkly humorous, Skagboys gives a gritty and gripping portrait of a time, not unlike ours, when money was scarce, unemployment was high, and drugs seemed the answer.

P.G. Wodehouse (1881-1975) was perhaps the most widely acclaimed British humorist of the twentieth century. Throughout his career, he brilliantly examined the complex and idiosyncratic nature of English upper-crust society with hilarious insight and wit. The works in this volume provide a wonderful introduction to Wodehouse’s work and his unique talent for joining fantastic plots with authentic emotion.In The Code of the Woosters, Wodehouse’s most famous duo, Bertie Wooster and his unflappable valet Jeeves, risks all to steal a cream jug. Uncle Fred in the Springtime, part of the famous Blandings Castle series, follows Uncle Fred as he attempts to ruin the Duke of Blandings while he is preoccupied with his favorite pig. Fourteen stories feature some of Wodehouse’s most memorable characters, and three autobiographical pieces provide a revealing look into Wodehouse’s life.With his gift for hilarity and his ever-human tone, Wodehouse and his work have never felt more lively. With a New Introduction by John Mortimer

Wodehouse died before finishing this novel, first published in 1977. Containing the bare-bones narrative and dialogue of the first 16 chapters, its story keeps to the Blandings formula: a pretty niece brought to the castle to separate her from an "impossible" (ie poor) suitor in London.

'brilliant. A Citizen Kane Of A Novel' Daily Telegraph __________________________________ Meet John James Todd: Scotsman, Auteur, Rousseau-fanatic - And 'subversive Element' Born In 1899, John James Todd Is One Of The Great, Failed Geniuses Of The Last Century. His Reminiscences, Collected In The New Confessions, Take Us From Edinburgh To The Western Front, The Berlin Film-world In The Twenties To Hollywood In The Thirties, Forties And Beyond. Suffering Imprisonment, Shooting, Marriage, Fatherhood, Divorce And Mccarthyism, Todd Is A Hostage To Good Fortune, Ill-judgement, Bad Luck, The Vast Sweep Of History And The Cruel, Cruel Hand Of Fate . . . __________________________________ 'a Magnificent Feat Of Storytelling And Panoramic Reconstruction' Observer 'paced And Plotted With Sinewy, Unfailing Skill . . . Boyd Has Given Us A Work Of Rich, Ripe And Immensely Enjoyable Entertainment' Sunday Times 'simply The Best Realistic Storyteller Of His Generation' Independent

Brace yourself, America, for Irvine Welsh's Trainspotting--the novel and the film that became the cult sensations of Britain. Trainspotting is the novel that first launched Irvine Welsh's spectacular career--an authentic, unrelenting, and strangely exhilarating episodic group portrait of blasted lives. It accomplished for its own time and place what Hubert Selby, Jr.'s Last Exit to Brooklyn did for his. Rents, Sick Boy, Mother Superior, Swanney, Spuds, and Seeker are as unforgettable a clutch of junkies, rude boys, and psychos as readers will ever encounter. Trainspotting was made into the 1996 cult film starring Ewan MacGregor and directed by Danny Boyle (A Shallow Grave).

A RADIO 4 BOOK OF THE WEEK 'An affectionate and revealing account … Funny, sad, real, rueful.' The Times 'Warm, rambling and self-aware' Guardian The long-awaited, rambling, tender, and very funny memoir from Adam Buxton Ramble /?ramb(?)l/ Verb 1. walk for pleasure in the countryside. 'Dr Buckles and Rosie the dog love rambling in the countryside.' 2. talk or write at length in a confused or inconsequential way. 'Adam rambles on about lots of consequential, compelling and personal matters in his tender, insightful, hilarious and totally unconfused memoir, Ramble Book.' Ramble Book is about parenthood, boarding school trauma, arguing with your partner, bad parties, confrontations on trains, friendship, wanting to fit in, growing up in the 80s, dead dads, teenage sexual anxiety, failed artistic endeavours, being a David Bowie fan; and how everything you read, watch and listen to as a child forms a part of the adult you become. It's also a book about the joys of going off topic and letting your mind wander. And it's about a short, hairy, frequently confused man called Adam Buxton.

From the bestselling author of The Passenger and the Pulitzer Prize–winning novel The Road, here is the story of Cornelius Suttree, who has forsaken a life of privilege with his prominent family to live in a dilapidated houseboat on the Tennessee River near Knoxville. Remaining on the margins of the outcast community there—a brilliantly imagined collection of eccentrics, criminals, and squatters—he rises above the physical and human squalor with detachment, humor, and dignity.