Christopher Buckley

"London, 1664. Twenty years after the English revolution, the monarchy has been restored and Charles II sits on the throne. The men who conspired to kill his father are either dead or disappeared. Baltasar 'Balty' St. Michel is twenty-four and has no skills and no employment. He gets by on handouts from his brother-in-law Samuel Pepys, an officer in the king's navy. Fed up with his needy relative, Pepys offers Balty a job in the New World. He is to...

Christopher Buckley at his best: an extraordinary, wide-ranging selection of essays both hilarious and poignant, irreverent and delightful. In his first book of essays since his 1997 bestseller, Wry Martinis, Buckley delivers a rare combination of big ideas and truly fun writing. Tackling subjects ranging from "How to Teach Your Four-Year-Old to Ski" to "A Short History of the Bug Zapper," and "The Art of Sacking" to literary friendships with Joseph...

In this collection are an imaginative group of stories that often bridge the gap between fantasy and science fiction. The collection includes one hundred of the author's science fiction, fantasy, horror, and midwestern short stories.

"Nick Naylor likes his job. In the neo-puritanical 1990's, it's a challenge to defend the rights of smokers and a privilege to promote their liberty. Sure, it hurts a little when you're compared to Nazi war criminals, but Nick says he's just doing what it takes to pay the mortgage and put his son through Washington's elite private school St. Euthanasius. He can handle the pressure from the antismoking zealots, but he is less certain about his new...

"When The Penguin Dictionary of Modern Humorous Quotations was published in 1987, P. J. O'Rourke had more entries than any living writer. And he kept writing funny stuff for another thirty-five years. Now, for the first time, P.J.'s best quips and riffs have been collected in one volume, edited by his longtime friend and award-winning magazine editor Terry McDonell. The Funny Stuff is organized by subject in alphabetical order from Agriculture to...

America's greatest living essayist writes about life and aging and being all too nicely out of it. In these personal pieces, he takes on topics as varied as grieving for a dead son, learning Latin late in life, and the pleasures of living with cats. Epstein gives us a "bonfire of his own vanities," his thoughts about why watching sports is so impossibly seductive, what it is like to be short, and why he misses smoking even decades as a health-obsessed...