As a great-great-great-great-grandchild of Irish immigrants, I come from a long, proud line of alcoholics, especially on my mother’s side. My childhood was a masterclass in chaos: family scream-fests, flung insults, and someone cracking a joke while dodging a punch. It was painful, yes, but also absurd and often hilarious. That’s where my dark wit comes from. Razor-sharp humor was how we made it out alive. It becomes a lens you’re trained to observe the world through since you were a wee lad. I’ve always been drawn to stories where grief and laughter sit at the same table, clinking pints. Satire and absurdity aren’t interests for me. They’re muscle memory.
I still remember the first time I read this book. I laughed, then I winced, then I realized I had just been handed a live 18th-century grenade disguised as an essay. I was stunned by how Swift used reason itself as a weapon to expose cruelty. It is not just satire; it is intellectual rebellion in powdered wig form.
What I love most is how he never once breaks character. The horror of the argument creeps in slowly, and that slow-burn discomfort thrilled me. It made me rethink what writing can do… how it can mock, indict, and entertain all at once. I have never trusted “logic” the same way since. And I have never underestimated the power of deadpan again.
Amazing title aside, I love David Sedaris because he makes discomfort feel like a private joke you’re lucky enough to overhear. The way he writes about insecurity, awkwardness, and deeply flawed family life struck something real in me. His humor sneaks up on you, often in the middle of a sentence you weren’t prepared to laugh at.
What I admire most is how he never tries to impress. His voice is honest, a little absurd, and somehow both cynical and strangely tender. I didn’t just laugh; I felt understood. Sedaris showed me that writing can be honest without being sentimental, funny without being safe, and deeply human without needing a resolution.
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…
In an underground coal mine in Northern Germany, over forty scribes who are fluent in different languages have been spared the camps to answer letters to the dead—letters that people were forced to answer before being gassed, assuring relatives that conditions in the camps were good.
This book broke my brain in the best possible way. I remember putting it down at times mid-chapter just to breathe. The logic was so twisted, so circular, that it made me feel like the walls of the world were soft and padded. I had never laughed so hard while also feeling completely doomed.
What stayed with me wasn’t just the absurdity, but the precision of it. The madness made sense. Every contradiction, every impossible choice, felt terrifyingly familiar. It helped me understand how systems fail us…not with malice, but with bureaucracy. Heller taught me that sometimes the only sane response to insanity is to laugh until it hurts.
Explosive, subversive, wild and funny, 50 years on the novel's strength is undiminished. Reading Joseph Heller's classic satire is nothing less than a rite of passage.
Set in the closing months of World War II, this is the story of a bombardier named Yossarian who is frantic and furious because thousands of people he has never met are trying to kill him. His real problem is not the enemy - it is his own army which keeps increasing the number of missions the men must fly to complete their service. If Yossarian makes any attempts to excuse himself from the…
Reading this book felt like being slapped awake and then daring to laugh about it. Beatty doesn’t just push boundaries… he burns the map. His writing is so fast and so layered that I had to reread entire pages just to catch the joke hiding inside the wound.
What hit me hardest was how fearless it is. The satire is brutal, yes, but never cruel. It’s the kind of book that forces you to sit with your complicity and full-throatedly admit you’re part of the mess. I finished it feeling smarter, shaken, and wildly alive. It’s one of the only novels I’ve ever read that made me laugh out loud while also whispering, “OMG, you’re not ready for this.”
'Outrageous, hilarious and profound.' Simon Schama, Financial Times
'The longer you stare at Beatty's pages, the smarter you'll get.' Guardian
'The most badass first 100 pages of an American novel I've read.' New York Times
A biting satire about a young man's isolated upbringing and the race trial that sends him to the Supreme Court, The Sellout showcases a comic genius at the top of his game.
Born in Dickens on the southern outskirts of Los Angeles, the narrator of The Sellout spent his childhood as the subject in his father's racially charged…
This is Detective Chief Superintendent Fran Harman's first case in a series of six books. Months from retirement Kent-based Fran doesn't have a great life - apart from her work. She's menopausal and at the beck and call of her elderly parents, who live in Devon. But instead of lightening…
I didn’t know whether to laugh or stage an intervention. This book introduced me to Ignatius J. Reilly, a character so insufferable and absurdly grandiose that I kept turning pages just to see how much worse he could get. I was horrified and hypnotized. I couldn’t look away.
What I love about this book is that it doesn’t ask you to like anyone. It asks you to witness the glorious wreckage of human delusion. It is chaotic, bloated, brilliant, and somehow still moving. Toole gave me a character I wanted to strangle, and a novel I wanted to reread. That kind of friction is rare, and I live for it.
'This is probably my favourite book of all time' Billy Connolly
A pithy, laugh-out-loud story following John Kennedy Toole's larger-than-life Ignatius J. Reilly, floundering his way through 1960s New Orleans, beautifully resigned with cover art by Gary Taxali _____________
'This city is famous for its gamblers, prostitutes, exhibitionists, anti-Christs, alcoholics, sodomites, drug addicts, fetishists, onanists, pornographers, frauds, jades, litterbugs, and lesbians . . . don't make the mistake of bothering me.'
Ignatius J. Reilly: fat, flatulent, eloquent and almost unemployable. By the standards of ordinary folk he is pretty much…
This is a darkly funny, sharply observant essay collection that revisits the chaos, absurdity, and quiet unraveling of normalcy during the COVID lockdown. With equal parts wit and exasperation, PS Conway blends satire, nostalgia, politics, and existential dread—what Conway terms Literary Comedic Nihilism. You learn a little, laugh a lot, and forget it all, because, let’s be honest, none of it ever really mattered anyway.
More than just a pandemic memoir, it’s a satirical autopsy of the anxieties of modern life: from useless pets to colonoscopies, schadenfreude to Shakespeare, manopause to the Gnostic Gospel of Reg. No topic is sacred. Conway’s essays cut deep, but they make you laugh out loud in doing so.
Magnolia Merryweather, a horse breeder, is eager to celebrate Christmas for the first time after the Civil War ended even as she grows her business. She envisions a calm, prosperous life ahead after the terror of the past four years. Only, all of her plans are thrown into disarray when…
The Strange Case of Guaritori Diolco
by
Bill Hiatt,
Guaritori awakens from a coma to find that he's lost twenty years--and his entire world.
Fiancée, family, and friends are all missing, perhaps dead. Technology has failed, and magic has risen, leaving society in ruins. Most survivors are at the mercy of anyone who has strong enough magic. Guaritori has…
