Recommendations based on "BEDROOM SECRETS OF THE MASTER CHE"

From Holden Caulfield to Moses Herzog, our best literature has been narrated by malcontents. To this lineage add Peter Jernigan, who views the world with ferocious intelligence, grim rapture, and a chainsaw wit that he turns, with disastrous consequences, on his wife, his teenaged son, his dangerously vulnerable mistress—and, not least of all, on himself. This novel is a bravura performance: a funny, scary, mesmerizing study of a man walking off the edge with his eyes wide open—wisecracking all the way.

The author writes: The two long pieces in this book originally came out in The New Yorker ? RAISE HIGH THE ROOF BEAM, CARPENTERS in 1955, SEYMOUR ? An Introduction in 1959. Whatever their differences in mood or effect, they are both very much concerned with Seymour Glass, who is the main character in my still-uncompleted series about the Glass family. It struck me that they had better be collected together, if not deliberately paired off, in something of a hurry, if I mean them to avoid unduly or undesirably close contact with new material in the series. There is only my word for it, granted, but I have several new Glass stories coming along ? waxing, dilating ? each in its own way, but I suspect the less said about them, in mixed company, the better. Oddly, the joys and satisfactions of working on the Glass family peculiarly increase and deepen for me with the years. I can't say why, though. Not, at least, outside the casino proper of my fiction.

“Wordsworth, Whitman, William Carlos Williams, and the Beats in their respective generations moved poetry toward a more natural language. Bukowski moved it a little farther.” –Los Angeles Times Book ReviewIn what is widely hailed as the best of his many novels, Charles Bukowski details the long, lonely years of his own hardscrabble youth in the raw voice of alter ego Henry Chinaski. From a harrowingly cheerless childhood in Germany through acne-riddled high school years and his adolescent discoveries of alcohol, woman, and the Los Angeles Public Library's collection of D.H. Lawrence, Ham on Rye offers a crude, brutal, and savagely funny portrait of an outcast's coming-of-age during the desperate days of the Great Depression.

Pull on your wellies, grab your flat cap and join Jeremy Clarkson in this hilarious and fascinating behind-the-scenes look at the farm we're all obsessed with.Welcome to Clarkson's farm.An idyllic spot offering picturesque views across the Cotswolds, bustling hedgerows and natural springs, it's the perfect plot of land for someone to delegate the actual, you know, farming to someone else while he galivants around the world in cars.Until one day, Jeremy decided he would do the farming itself.After all, how hard could it be? . . .Faced with suffocating red tape, biblical weather, local objections, a global pandemic and his own frankly staggering ignorance of how to 'do farming', Jeremy soon realises that turning the farm around is going to take more than splashing out on a massive tractor.Fortunately, there's help at hand from a large and (mostly) willing team, including girlfriend Lisa, Kaleb the Tractor Driver, Cheerful Charlie, Ellen the Shepherd and Gerald, his Head of Security and Dry Stone Waller.Between them, they enthusiastically cultivate crops, rear livestock and hens, keep bees, bottle spring water and open a farm shop. But profits remain elusive.And yet while the farm may be called Diddly Squat for good reason, Jeremy soon begins to understand that it's worth a whole lot more to him than pounds, shillings and pence . . .

For every Terry Pratchett fan, an absolute must-have, giftable book—favorite quotations from his beloved Discworld canon. Gleaned from more than two decades' worth of Discworld tales, here is an essential compendium of insightful musings, witty commentary, and sagacious observations by New York Times bestselling author Terry Pratchett, compiled by Pratchett expert Stephen Briggs. • In the bathtub of history the truth is harder to hold than the soap, and much more difficult to find... • All assassins had a full-length mirror in their rooms, because it would be a terrible insult to anyone to kill them when you were badly dressed. Filled with wonderful bon mots, double entendres, not to mention breathtaking insights, The Wit and Wisdom of Discworld is a compendium of the wittiest, pithiest, and wisest quotations from Terry Pratchett’s madcap universe—a place that looks, sounds, and smells suspiciously like our own. “Pratchett has created an alternate universe full of trolls, dwarfs, wizards, and other fantasy elements, and he uses that universe to reflect on our own culture with entertaining and gloriously funny results. It’s an accomplishment nothing short of magical.”—Chicago Tribune

How could you refuse the polite invitation of begoggled Danny Wallace in Join Me ? You don't know what you could be missing out on. It's all about living for the moment in this quirky, seemingly pointless yet addictive narrative. Finding himself with too much time on his hands after quitting his BBC job, Danny revels in "sitting around in his pants" and generally taking a break from the responsibilities of working life. Danny attends the funeral of his great uncle Gallus and finds out that he had set up a commune of like-minded people to escape Swiss small town small-mindedness in the 1940s. Intrigued by this idea, on his return to London Danny places a cryptic advert in the classified ads paper Loot and gets some surprising results. His Norwegian radio-producer girlfriend Hanne is bemused and infuriated that this has become more than a transient interest; it takes over his life--and hers. The number of "joinees"--people replying to his ad--escalates as word gets out about this new "happy cult", but without a clue about what he wants to achieve, or do with all his newfound friends, Danny has to think fast as dissent rises in the ranks. Now the reluctant leader of a troop of random hopefuls, he maintains their interest with obscure e-mails and watches as his joinees meet and bond. Whatever he had created, it was bigger than he had anticipated. From an initially puerile idea, it had grown into something of a social experiment--why were people willing to take the risk? What was lacking in their lives that they thought they might get out of contacting a stranger? Taking risks, no matter how big or small, is the essential crux of the matter here and of course, nothing ventured, nothing gained. -- Angela Boodoo

If puritanism is, as H.L. Mencken once said, the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy, then this glorious, monumental collection by one of England's most popular humorists is a puritan's nightmare. Focusing primarily on the 19th and 20th century, but with material dating back to Columbus, Frank Muir has packed this volume with enough joy and laughter to sink the Mayflower.The range of comic material is amazing--from the gentle, charming comedy of manners, to biting satire, to outrageous parody. There are excerpts from the novels of Jane Austen, P.G. Wodehouse and Mark Twain, complete short stories by O. Henry and Frank O'Connor, classic tall tales from Australia (including one by "Banjo" Patterson, who also wrote "Waltzing Matilda"), passages from Groucho Marx's correspondence with Warner Brothers, newspaper columns written by Art Buchwald and Myles na Gopaleen (the novelist Flann O'Brien), a selection of Samuel Johnson's comic definitions, plus a sprinkling of egregious puns, witty sayings, and even the clever names of stores (such as the New York restaurant "Just for the Halibut" and the London beauty parlor "Curl Up and Dye"). Muir has gathered work from over two hundred writers and from every English-speaking country. Virtually all of your favorites are here: Jonathan Swift, Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, Laurence Sterne, Anita Loos, Ring Lardner, Alexander Woollcott, Robert Benchley, Dorothy Parker, S.J. Perelman, Damon Runyon, Fran Lebowitz, Joseph Heller, Evelyn Waugh, Garrison Keilor, Erma Bombeck, Tom Wolfe, and countless others. In addition, there are comic pieces from writers you wouldn't expect to find--such as Thomas Hardy or Lawrence Durrell--and many many writers you may not have discovered yet, such as Jerome K. Jerome or Daisy Ashford (who wrote an unintentionally hysterical novel at age nine, which she published in her thirties).Frank Muir is one of Britain's best-loved humorists, the host of a highly popular television show and the prolific author of dozens of hilarious books, including the best-selling The Frank Muir Book. Here he provides not only a painfully funny collection, but also generous introductions to each writer, which are comic gems in themselves. Except for the occasional puritan, this is a book that everyone will enjoy.

'This is a miracle of a book' George Lamming'Compelling. Stuart Hall's story is the story of an age' Owen Jones'Sometimes I feel I was the last colonial'This is the story, in his own words, of the extraordinary life of Stuart Hall: writer, thinker and one of the leading intellectual lights of his age. Growing up in a middle-class family in 1930s Jamaica, then still a British colony, Hall found himself caught between two worlds: the stiflingly respectable middle class in Kingston, who, in their habits and ambitions, measured themselves against the white planter elite; and working-class and peasant Jamaica, neglected and grindingly poor, though rich in culture, music and history. But as colonial rule was challenged, things began to change in Jamaica and across the world.When, in 1951, a scholarship took him across the Atlantic to Oxford University, Hall encountered other Caribbean writers and thinkers, from Sam Selvon and George Lamming to V. S. Naipaul. He also forged friendships with the likes of Raymond Williams and E. P. Thompson, with whom he worked in the formidable political movement, the New Left, and developed his groundbreaking ideas on cultural theory. Familiar Stranger takes us to the heart of Hall's struggle in post-war England: that of building a home and a life in a country where, rapidly, radically, the social landscape was transforming, and urgent new questions of race, class and identity were coming to light.Told with passion and wisdom, this is a story of how the forces of history shape who we are.

5 Volumes of the Hitchhiker Trilogy: The Hitchhiker Guide To the Galaxy, The Restaurant At the End of the Universe, Life The Universe and Everything, So long and Thanks for all the Fish, Mostly Harmless.

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