Books like 'Take the Cannoli'
Readers who enjoyed Take the Cannoli by Sarah Vowell also liked the following books featuring the same tropes, story themes, relationship dynamics and character types.
historical comedy humor politics journalism coming-of-age satire historical-fiction
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Blackadder: The Whole Damn Dynasty, 1485-1917 by Richard Curtis, Ben Elton
Rated: 4.43 of 5 stars · 14 ratingsThen look no further. Blackadder: The Whole Damn Dynasty is the book for you. Here, at last, for the first time, are the full scripts of one of British television's funniest comedies... -
The Portable Dorothy Parker by Dorothy Parker, Marion Meade
Rated: 4.29 of 5 stars · 24 ratingsThe second revision in sixty years, this sublime collection ranges over the verse, stories, essays, and journalism of one of the twentieth century's most quotable authors.For this new twenty-first-century edition, devoted admirers can be sure to find their favorite verse and stories. But a variety of fresh material has also been added to create a fuller, more authentic picture of her life's work... -
What Ho! The Best of P.G. Wodehouse by P.G. Wodehouse
Rated: 4.42 of 5 stars · 12 ratingsPublished to mark the 25th anniversary of PG Wodehouse's death, this is the first major new selection of his work to be published for a generation. This anthology of stories, novel-extracts, working drafts, articles, letters and poems gives a fresh angle on the twentieth century's greatest humourist. In his introduction, Stephen Fry writes: "What a very, very lucky person you are... -
Run with the Horsemen by Ferrol Sams
Rated: 4.31 of 5 stars · 16 ratingsPorter Osborne Jr. is a precocious, sensitive, and rambunctious boy trying to make it through adolescence during the depression years. On a red-clay farm in Georgia he learns all there is to know about cotton chopping, hog killing, watermelon thumping, and mule handling. School provides a quick course in practical joking, schoolboy crushes, athletic glory, and clandestine sex...Categorized as:
coming-of-age historical-fiction humor 20th-century animals anthologies classics comedy -
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The Granny by Brendan O'Carroll
Rated: 4.29 of 5 stars · 14 ratingsThe New York Times Book Review praised Brendan O'Carroll's first novel, The Mammy, as "Cheerful...as unpretentious and satisfying as a home-cooked meal...with a delicious dessert of an ending... -
The Best Short Stories of O. Henry by O. Henry
Rated: 4.25 of 5 stars · 16 ratingsThe more than 600 stories written by O. Henry provided an embarrassment of riches for the compilers of this volume.The final selection of the thirty-eight stories in this collection offers for the reader's delight those tales honored almost unanimously by anthologists and those that represent, in variety and balance, the best work of America's favorite storyteller... -
The Chisellers by Brendan O'Carroll
Rated: 4.25 of 5 stars · 16 ratingsThe Mrs. Browne trilogy became an instant bestselling success in author Brendan O'Carroll's native Ireland. Similarly, when Plume introduced The Mammy (the first book in the series, May 1999) in the United States, it was greeted with overwhelming enthusiasm from American readers. Fans of Agnes Browne craving further hilarious and heartwarming adventures will be delighted with The Chisellers... -
A Foreign Woman by Sergei Dovlatov, Antonina W. Bouis
Rated: 4.25 of 5 stars · 16 ratingsAfter leaving the Soviet Union following a series of unsatisfying relationships, Marusya Tatarovich quickly becomes the center of the Russian community in Queens, New York, but finds that it mirrors in many ways the community she left... -
Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas And Other American Stories by Hunter S. Thompson
Rated: 4.25 of 5 stars · 16 ratingsDr. Thompson made the list of inspirational scribes when I polled in a recent writing workshop, and why not? Back in a spiffy Modern Library edition, replete with additional essays, I find in this iconographic work that HST both invoked--and provoked--an era that was not so much the '60s proper, but rather the mean, shadow-filled death of that time, which is still playing out... -
The Collected Dorothy Parker by Dorothy Parker
Rated: 4.25 of 5 stars · 12 ratingsDorothy Parker, more than any of her contemporaries, captured the spirit of the Jazz Age in her poetry and prose, and The Collected Dorothy Parker includes an introduction by Brendan Gill in Penguin Modern Classics.Dorothy Parker was the most talked-about woman of her day, notorious as the hard-drinking bad girl with a talent for stinging repartee and endlessly quotable one-liners... -
Letters from the Earth: Uncensored Writings by Mark Twain, Henry Nash Smith
Rated: 4.17 of 5 stars · 18 ratingsLetters from the Earth is one of Mark Twain's posthumously published works. The essays were written during a difficult time in Twain's life; he was deep in debt and had lost his wife and one of his daughters. The book consists of a series of short stories, many of which deal with God and Christianity. Twain penned a series of letters from the point-of-view of a dejected angel on Earth... -
My Uncle Napoleon by Iraj Pezeshkzad, Azar Nafisi
Rated: 4.17 of 5 stars · 18 ratingsA teenage boy makes the mistake of falling in love with the much-protected daughter of his uncle, mischievously nicknamed after his hero Napoleon Bonaparte, the curmudgeonly self-appointed patriarch of a large and extended Iranian family in 1940s Tehran...Categorized as:
coming-of-age historical-fiction humor politics satire 20th-century action-adventure adult -
Much Obliged, Jeeves by P.G. Wodehouse
Rated: 4.17 of 5 stars · 18 ratingsA Bertie and Jeeves classic, featuring the Junior Ganymede, a Market Snodsbury election, and the Observer crossword puzzle.Jeeves, who has saved Bertie Wooster so often in the past, may finally prove to be the unwitting cause of this young master's undoing in Jeeves and the Tie that Binds... -
Bell Hammers: The True Folk Tale of Little Egypt, Illinois by Lancelot Schaubert
Rated: 4.33 of 5 stars · 6 ratings"Schaubert recounts a mischievous man's eight decades in Illinois's Little Egypt region in his picaresque debut BELL HAMMERS. Remmy's life of constant schemes and a lifelong feud with the local oil drilling company proves consequential. This is a hoot."- Publisher's Weekly🏆 finalist for Glimmer Train's Fiction Open.PRANKS. OIL. PROTEST. JOKES BETWEEN NEWLYWEDS... -
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Swami and Friends, The Bachelor of Arts, The Dark Room, The English Teacher by R.K. Narayan, Alexander McCall Smith
Rated: 4.25 of 5 stars · 8 ratingsR. K. Narayan (1906—2001) witnessed nearly a century of change in his native India and captured it in fiction of uncommon warmth and vibrancy. The four novels collected here, all written during British rule, bring colonial India into intimate focus through the narrative gifts of this master of literary realism...Categorized as:
coming-of-age historical-fiction humor action-adventure adult anthologies classics comedy -
1776 by Peter Stone, Sherman Edwards
Rated: 4.17 of 5 stars · 12 ratings1776 is an inspiring and imaginative re-creation of the events from May 8 to July 4 in Philadelphia, when the second Continental Congress argued about, voted on, and signed the Declaration of Independence. From John Adams's opening diatribe to the signing of the document, 1776 is a classic musical play of mounting tension and triumph... -
Dumb Luck by Vũ Trọng Phụng, Peter Zinoman
Rated: 4.13 of 5 stars · 16 ratingsBanned in Vietnam until 1986, Dumb Luck--by the controversial and influential Vietnamese writer Vu Trong Phung--is a bitter satire of the rage for modernization in Vietnam during the late colonial era. First published in Hanoi during 1936, it follows the absurd and unexpected rise within colonial society of a street-smart vagabond named Red-haired Xuan... -
Going to the Dogs: The Story of a Moralist by Erich Kästner
Rated: 4.11 of 5 stars · 18 ratingsGoing to the Dogs is set in Berlin after the crash of 1929 and before the Nazi takeover, years of rising unemployment and financial collapse. The moralist in question is Jakob Fabian, “aged thirty-two, profession variable, at present advertising copywriter . . -
Oblomov by Ivan Goncharov
Rated: 4.07 of 5 stars · 28 ratingsEven though Ivan Goncharov wrote several books that were widely read and discussed during his lifetime, today he is remembered for one novel, Oblomov, published in 1859, an indisputable classic of Russian literature, the artistic stature and cultural significance of which may be compared only to other such masterpieces as Nikolai Gogol's Dead Souls, Leo Tolstoy's Anna Karenina, and Fyodor... -
The New Confessions by William Boyd
Rated: 4.06 of 5 stars · 16 ratingsIn this extraordinary novel, William Boyd presents the autobiography of John James Todd, whose uncanny and exhilarating life as one of the most unappreciated geniuses of the twentieth century is equal parts Laurence Stern, Charles Dickens, Robertson Davies, and Saul Bellow, and a hundred percent William Boyd. From his birth in 1899, Todd was doomed... -
The Man Who Came to Dinner by George S. Kaufman, Moss Hart
Rated: 4.06 of 5 stars · 18 ratingsThe Man Who Came to Dinner...and stayed and stayed and stayed! Sheridan Whiteside, the man who came to dinner, throws out insults with a voluminous precision volley. Maggie Cutler, his secretary, is described by Whiteside as an aging debutante supporting her two-headed brother... -
Pygmalion and Three Other Plays by George Bernard Shaw
Rated: 4.00 of 5 stars · 24 ratingsPygmalion and Three Other Plays, by George Bernard Shaw, is part of the Barnes & Noble Classics series, which offers quality editions at affordable prices to the student and the general reader, including new scholarship, thoughtful design, and pages of carefully crafted extras... -
The Inspector General by Nikolai Gogol
Rated: 4.00 of 5 stars · 24 ratingsConsidered the high point of Gogol's writing for the stage and a masterpiece of dramatic satire, The Inspector General skewers the stupidity, greed, and venality of Russian provincial officials. When it is announced that the Inspector General is coming to visit incognito, Anton, the chief of police, hastens to clean up the town before his arrival... -
A Modest Proposal and Other Satirical Works by Jonathan Swift
Rated: 4.05 of 5 stars · 35 ratingsThe originality, concentrated power and ‘fierce indignation’ of his satirical writing have earned Jonathan Swift a reputation as the greatest prose satirist in English literature. Gulliver’s Travels is, of course, his world renowned masterpiece in the genre; however, Swift wrote other, shorter works that also offer excellent evidence of his inspired lampoonery... -
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The Petty Demon by Fyodor Sologub
Rated: 4.00 of 5 stars · 14 ratingsThe Petty Demon is one of the funniest Russian novels. It is also the most decadent of the great Russian classics, replete with naked boys, sinuous girls, and a strange mixture of beauty and perversity. The main hero, Peredonov, is as comical as he is disgusting, he is at once a victim, a monster, a silly hypocrite, and a sadistic dullard... -
The Mouse on the Moon by Leonard Wibberley
Rated: 4.00 of 5 stars · 6 ratingsThe Duchy of Grand Fenwick, the world's smallest country, whose army of 20 longbow men defeated the United States in The Mouse that Roared is back again...Categorized as:
historical-fiction humor politics satire action-adventure adult alternate-history book -
2028 by Ken Saunders
Rated: 4.00 of 5 stars · 6 ratings2028. Prime Minister Fitzwilliams' instincts tell him it's time to call a snap election. His cabinet team is adequate (just), the howling protests of the doctors after the GP changes has finally died down and, best of all, the Australian Greens are in receivership... -
An Advantageous Marriage: A thrilling Regency romance by Alice Chetwynd Ley
Rated: 4.00 of 5 stars · 6 ratingsA fun and flirty Regency romance! For fans of Georgette Heyer, Mary Balogh, Jane Aiken Hodge and Jane Austen. The scheming Turville family have met their match… 1816, England The aristocratic Turvilles had always deplored an unfortunate connection with Trade through the marriage twenty years previously of the Baron’s brother with the daughter of a Yorkshire manufacturer...Categorized as:
historical-fiction humor coming-of-age regency historical industrial-era fiction family -
The Miseducation Years by Ross O'Carroll-Kelly, Paul Howard
Rated: 4.08 of 5 stars · 12 ratingsSo there I was, roysh, putting the 'in' in 'in crowd', hanging out, pick of the babes, bills from the old pair to fund the lifestyle I, like, totally deserve. But being a schools rugby legend has its downsides, roysh, like all the total knobs wanting to chill in your, like, reflected glory, and the bunny-boilers who decide they want to be with me and won't take, like, no for an answer... -
Travesties by Tom Stoppard
Rated: 3.94 of 5 stars · 16 ratingsTravesties was born out of Stoppard's noting that in 1917 three of the twentieth century's most crucial revolutionaries -- James Joyce, the Dadaist founder Tristan Tzara, and Lenin -- were all living in Zurich... -
In God We Trust: All Others Pay Cash by Jean Shepherd
Rated: 3.88 of 5 stars · 16 ratingsA beloved, bestselling classic of humorous and nostalgic Americana, reissued in a strikingly designed paperback edition.Before Garrison Keillor and Spalding Gray there was Jean Shepherd: a master monologist and writer who spun the materials of his all-American childhood into immensely resonant--and utterly hilarious--works of comic art...Categorized as:
coming-of-age historical-fiction humor satire 20th-century adult anthologies audiobook -
The Dream Life of Sukhanov by Olga Grushin
Rated: 3.83 of 5 stars · 12 ratingsA brilliantly crafted novel about one man's betrayal of his talent, his friends, and his principles-a work of demon energy, startling imagery, and utter originality. At fifty-six, Anatoly Sukhanov has everything a man could want. Nearly twenty-five years ago, he traded his precarious existence as a brilliant underground artist for the perks and comforts of a high-ranking Soviet apparatchik... -
Semi-Tough by Dan Jenkins
Rated: 3.83 of 5 stars · 12 ratingsMade into a hilarious and timeless film starring Burt Reynolds, Kris Kristofferson, and Jill Clayburgh, and recently named number seven on Sports Illustrated's Top 100 Sports Books of All Time, Semi-Tough is Dan Jenkins's masterpiece and considered by many to be the funniest sports book ever written... -
Augustus Carp, Esq. By Himself Being the Autobiography of a Really Good Man by Henry Howarth Bashford
Rated: 3.75 of 5 stars · 8 ratingsIt is customary, I have noticed, in publishing an autobiography to preface it with some sort of apology. But there are times, and surely the present is one of them, when to do so is manifestly unnecessary... -
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Roscoe by William Kennedy
Rated: 3.75 of 5 stars · 8 ratingsThe first novel from William Kennedy in more than five years and universally acclaimed as his most powerful work since the Pulitzer Prize-winning Ironweed, Roscoe shows Kennedy at his very best. It's V-J Day, the war is over, and Roscoe Conway, after twenty-six years as the second in command of Albany's notorious political machine, decides to quit politics forever... -
Roughing It by Mark Twain
Rated: 3.89 of 5 stars · 33 ratingsRoughing It is a book of semi-autobiographical travel literature written by American humorist Mark Twain. He wrote it during 1870–71 and published in 1872, as a prequel to his first book The Innocents Abroad (1869). This book tells of Twain's adventures prior to his pleasure cruise related in Innocents Abroad... -
Seven Men by Max Beerbohm
Rated: 3.83 of 5 stars · 6 ratingsIn Seven Men the brilliant English caricaturist and critic Max Beerbohm turns his comic searchlight upon the fantastic fin-de-siècle world of the 1890s—the age of Oscar Wilde, Aubrey Beardsley, and the young Yeats, as well of Beerbohm's own first success... -
Democracy by Joan Didion
Rated: 3.81 of 5 stars · 16 ratingsInez Victor knows that the major casualty of the political life is memory. But the people around Inez have made careers out of losing track. Her senator husband wants to forget the failure of his last bid for the presidency. Her husband's handler would like the press to forget that Inez's father is a murderer... -
Paradise Lodge by Nina Stibbe
Rated: 3.79 of 5 stars · 14 ratingsA delightful comic novel about growing up, getting old, and every step in between from the highly acclaimed author of Man at the Helm and Love, Nina...Categorized as:
coming-of-age historical-fiction humor audiobook book comedy female-author female-mc -
The City and the Pillar by Gore Vidal
Rated: 3.80 of 5 stars · 20 ratingsA literary cause célèbre when first published more than fifty years ago, Gore Vidal's now-classic The City and the Pillar stands as a landmark novel of the gay experience.Jim, a handsome, all-American athlete, has always been shy around girls. But when he and his best friend, Bob, partake in "awful kid stuff", the experience forms Jim's ideal of spiritual completion...Categorized as:
coming-of-age historical-fiction humor satire 20th-century adult audiobook bildungsroman -
Cakes and Ale by W. Somerset Maugham, 威廉·薩默塞特·毛姆
Rated: 3.78 of 5 stars · 18 ratingsCakes and Ale is a delicious satire of London literary society between the Wars. Social climber Alroy Kear is flattered when he is selected by Edward Driffield's wife to pen the official biography of her lionized novelist husband, and determined to write a bestseller. But then Kear discovers the great novelist's voluptuous muse (and unlikely first wife), Rosie... -
Coming Up for Air by George Orwell
Rated: 3.79 of 5 stars · 24 ratingsGeorge Bowling, the hero of Orwell's comic novel, is a middle-aged insurance salesman who lives in an average English suburban row house with a wife and two children. One day, after winning some money from a bet, he goes back to the village where he grew up, to fish for carp in a pool he remembers from thirty years before... -
Living by Henry Green
Rated: 3.63 of 5 stars · 8 ratingsA timeless work of social satire, set in the 1920s and considered one of the most insightful Modernist depictions of England's working class Living is a book about life in a factory town and the operations of a factory, from the workers on the floor to the boss in his office... -
Jodía Pavía (1525): Un relato by Arturo Pérez-Reverte
Rated: 3.63 of 5 stars · 8 ratingsDesde su cárcel madrileña, en una carta a su amante Mimí la Garce, el rey Francisco I de Francia rememora la batalla en que fue derrotado y preso en Italia por las tropas de Carlos V. Un relato irreverente y muy divertido sobre la Batalla de Pavía de 1525. «Querida Mimí, mon amour: Unas veces se pierde y otras se deja de ganar. Aquí me tienes, voilá, de turista forzoso en Madrid... -
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The Devil's Disciple by George Bernard Shaw
Rated: 3.71 of 5 stars · 14 ratingsPurchase one of 1st World Library's Classic Books and help support our free internet library of downloadable eBooks. 1st World Library-Literary Society is a non-profit educational organization. Visit us online at www.1stWorldLibrary.ORG - - At the most wretched hour between a black night and a wintry morning in the year 1777, Mrs... -
If You're Reading This, I'm Already Dead by Andrew Nicoll
Rated: 3.50 of 5 stars · 6 ratings'I want people to know how Otto Witte, acrobat of Hamburg, became the crowned king of Albania.' Otto Witte is an old man. The Allies are raining bombs on his city and, having narrowly escaped death, he has come home to his little caravan to drink what remains of his coffee (dust) and wait for the inevitable... -
Love and Garbage by Ivan Klíma
Rated: 3.67 of 5 stars · 12 ratingsThe narrator of Ivan Klima's novel has temporarily abandoned his work-in-progress -an essay on Kafka -and exchanged his writer's pen for the orange vest of a Prague road-sweeper. As he works, he meditates on Czechoslovakia, on Kafka, on life, on art and, obsessively, on his passionate and adulterous love affair with the sculptress Daria... -
O scrisoare pierdută by Ion Luca Caragiale
Rated: 3.72 of 5 stars · 18 ratingsO scrisoare pierdută (Romanian for "A Lost Letter") is a play by Ion Luca Caragiale. It premiered in 1884, and arguably represents the high point of his career... -
Glory by Vladimir Nabokov
Rated: 3.69 of 5 stars · 16 ratingsGlory is the wryly ironic story of Martin Edelweiss, a twenty-two-year-old Russian émigré of no account, who is in love with a girl who refuses to marry him. Convinced that his life is about to be wasted and hoping to impress his love, he embarks on a "perilous, daredevil project"--an illegal attempt to re-enter the Soviet Union, from which he and his mother had fled in 1919... -
Redeye by Clyde Edgerton
Rated: 3.50 of 5 stars · 8 ratingsA New York Times Notable Book. Hang on to your ten gallon hats--Clyde Edgerton has taken his eye for detail, his ear for humor, and his nose for the odor of religious hypocrisy to the Wild West. In REDEYE, he leads us back to turn-of-the-century Colorado, where a motley crew of innocents and scoundrels, visionaries and vultures, tells us How the West Was Made Safe for Free Enterprise...
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