Humor Books

The Swoop!

P. G. Wodehouse

The Swoop! tells of the simultaneous invasion of England by several armies — "England was not merely beneath the heel of the invader. It was beneath the heels of nine invaders. There was barely standi..

Galusha the Magnificent

Joseph Crosby Lincoln

Mr. Horatio Pulcifer was on his way home. It was half-past five of a foggy, gray afternoon in early October; it had rained the previous day and a part of the day before that and it looked extremely li..

The Fiend's Delight

Dod Grile

The atrocities constituting this “cold collation” of diabolisms are taken mainly from various Californian journals. They are cast in the American language, and liberally enriched with unintelligibilit..

The Hohenzollerns in America

Stephen Leacock

The proper punishment for the Hohenzollerns, and the Hapsburgs, and the Mecklenburgs, and the Muckendorfs, and all such puppets and princelings, is that they should be made to work; and not made to wo..

The Love Sonnets of a Hoodlum

Wallace Irwin

So Complained Phineas Fletcher in his Purple Island as long ago as 1633. Three centuries have brought to the development of lyric passion no higher form than that of the sonnet cycle. The sonnet has b..

Barry Lyndon

William Makepeace Thackeray

Barry Lyndon—far from the best known, but by some critics acclaimed as the finest, of Thackeray’s works—appeared originally as a serial a few years before VANITY FAIR was written; yet it was not publi..

American Fairy Tales

L. Frank Baum

This collection of fantasy stories was originally serialized in regional newspapers, prior to being published as a complete volume. The stories, as critics have noted, lack the high-fantasy aspect of ..

The Paying Guest

George Gissing

Clarence and Emmeline Mumford are in for a real treat when they take in the young, outspoken Miss Louise Derrick as their guest. Shedding a light on class struggles in the Victorian era, The Paying Gu..