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  F for Effort - More of the Very...

  Richard Benson

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  From the author of the national bestseller F in Exams comes a new compendium of hilarious and inventive wrong test answers and homework hiccups.F for Effort features hilarious gems from elementary school (“two halves make a whale”), middle school (Q: What does “germinate” mean? A: To become a German citizen), and high school (Q: Fossil fuels are usually associated with which major type of rock? A: Classic rock). These 250 examples of creative invention are sure to charm anyone who has had to bluff or blunder their way through a test. Plus, this is a fixed-format version of the book, which looks nearly identical to the print version.

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  The Benny Kramer Novels - Fourth...

  Jerome Weidman

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  A New York native looks back on his Lower East Side youth in a trilogy from the New York Times–bestselling author and Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright.   After making a splash with his first novel, I Can Get It for You Wholesale—published in 1937 and praised by the likes of Hemingway and Fitzgerald—Jerome Weidman had a long and prolific career as a fiction writer and playwright. In the 1970s he published three wise, funny, and nostalgic novels about the Lower East Side roots of a colorful character named Benny Kramer. For the first time, the trilogy is available in a single volume, with a foreword by Alistair Cooke.  Fourth Street East: When Benny Kramer’s father came to the United States, he was hungry, broke, and ignorant. Handed a banana and told it was “American food,” he scarfed it down, peel and all. By the time he died, he was no richer, but much wiser, and everything he learned he imparted to his son. Growing up on New York’s Lower East Side between the wars, Benny’s life was just as chaotic as his neighborhood. How many young boys have seen a man decapitated by a horse? How many know blacksmiths who got tangled up in a multiple homicide? How many win an elocution contest, only to find out it was rigged by the mob? For Benny, these are everyday events, remembered with biting wit and fond affection.   “This is all much more than noodle soup nostalgia—there’s humor, and stamina, and if middle age has rubbed off here and there, it has also lent a certain wisdom.” —Kirkus Reviews  Last Respects: For most of his life, Benny Kramer’s mother was an inescapable presence in his life. But on the day of her death, her body disappears on its way from hospital to morgue. While scouring New York in search of her body, Benny remembers the first adventure his mother sent him on, fifty years before. At the height of Prohibition, his mother gives him a simple task: deliver eighteen bottles of bootlegged hooch to a wedding. Along the way, the would-be rumrunner encounters sinister slumlords, a sadistic rabbi, and enough slapstick obstacles to give the Marx Brothers fits. Reliving each moment as he searches for his mother, Benny comes to understand that this is just another day in the life of a boy desperate to find his mother’s love.   “The last respects are paid with comic tumult and an acute compassion. Weidman at the apex.” —Kirkus Reviews  Tiffany Street: Though his trip from New York to Philadelphia is for business, Benny Kramer has also planned a rendezvous—not with a mistress, but with one of the city’s finest doctors. Kramer plans to enlist him in a noble purpose: keeping his son out of Vietnam. The doctor won’t provide this service to just anyone, but he and Benny have a mutual friend in the incomparable Sebastian Roon. Benny and Seb have been friends since the Depression, when they shared countless adventures across New York’s Lower East Side. Now Benny’s counting on that friendship to ensure the same life of endless possibilities for his son.   “Highly readable.” —Chicago Tribune

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  The Last of the Bowmans

  J P Henderson

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  After an absence of some seven years, Greg Bowman returns from America to find his father lying in a bamboo coffin, his estranged brother Billy stalking a woman with no feet and his seventy-nine-year-old Uncle Frank planning to rob a bank. While renovating the family house he is unexpectedly visited by the presence of his dead father and charged with the task of 'fixing' the family. In the course of his reluctant investigations, Greg discovers not only the secrets behind the strange behaviour of his brother and uncle but also an unsettling secret of his father's, and one that brings him face to face with the unintended consequences of his own past.
  The Last of the Bowmans is the story of a family on the run from itself in a city with no place to go.

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  Abbott and Costello: Gold Mine

  Bud Abbott, Lou Costello

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  Bud is going to invest Lou's $75. They launch into the do gold orr routine. Bud has convinced Lou to invest his $75 in a gold mine. Abbott and Costello arrive in Gold Tooth. They go to the Red Dog saloon. They then start mining for gold in the mine. The mine is giving way but it turns out it was all just a dream.

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  I'm Single Because I Hate My...

  Sarah Amy Jennifer Jones

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  “To be fair, there are lots of reasons I’m single, but some of my friends’ husbands certainly make me happy with that choice.” 
  In this series of essays, Sarah Amy Jennifer Jones (not her real name), a self-described hot mess masquerading as a normal human being discusses love, relationships, and the often confusing life of a true, modern-day spinster. 
  Join her for the laughs, misery, and insights that only someone with too much time on their hands can deliver.

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  How About Never—Is Never Good...

  Bob Mankoff

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  New York Times Bestseller: “A memoir [and] an enormous window into the mystery and alchemy behind the creation and selection of New Yorker cartoons.” —The Washington Post 
   
  Hi, this is me, Bob Mankoff. And this is my memoir. In it I’ll usher you into the hallowed halls of the New Yorker (Shhh! Quiet, you’ll upset the fact checkers) to show you the soup-to-nuts process of cartoon creation, giving you a detailed look not only at my own work, but that of the artists who keep you laughing every week, except, of course, when they don’t, puzzling you with a cartoon that you “don’t get” and then you shoot me an email asking me to explain it. Well, you can stop the shooting. You’re holding the solution to those cartoon puzzlers in your hands (it’s in chapter nine). 
   
  What else? Oh goodness, self-effacing, humble me has left out the personal part, the essential me-ness part, forged in 1950s Queens, New York, where I became a wisecracking Jewish kid who mimicked Jerry Lewis, did funny drawings, and turned my mother’s Yiddishisms into American humor, leading straight to a career as a successful cartoonist and cartoon editor of the New Yorker. Nah, that’s not the way it happened. You’ll need to read the book to find out how it really went down. 
   
  “Fascinating, forthright, and funny . . . Mankoff also writes with first-hand knowledge about the topic of laughter itself. He dares to ask the question, ‘What makes something funny?’, and answers it with intelligence, originality, and, of course, humor.” —Roz Chast, #1 New York Times–bestselling author of Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant? 
   
  “Not just a charming memoir but also a charming grab bag of cartoon history, cartoon theory (nothing too woolly), and shop talk.” —The New York Times Book Review 
   
  “Serves up not only a mini-collection of great cartoons but also a look at the shift in styles through the editorships of legendary William Shawn, Tina Brown, and current editor David Remnick. Mankoff also provides a very funny and insightful look at how to win the New Yorker caption contest.” —Publishers Weekly

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