Funny Buggers: The Best Lines from Australian Stand-up Comedy

Author: Karl Chandler
Publisher: Penguin Group Australia
ISBN: 1742534252
Category : Humor
Languages : en
Pages : 254

Book Description
Karl Chandler is a funny bugger and so are his mates. In fact, our local talent has been killing it in clubs and festivals the world over. Lucky for us, these comics have worked around their hectic schedules – setting their alarm clocks for before midday and logging off Twitter – to cough up some of the most pants-wettingly funny stuff you'll read all year. This is a line-up of the hottest comedians around, giving you a front-row seat to their best material. I stopped writing a diary when I read Anne Frank's effort. That genre has been conquered. HANNAH GADSBY Television is a very powerful tool. But then again, so is Eddie McGuire. GREG FLEET Throw your hands in the air like you just don't care. Unless you're at an auction. DAVE THORNTON The other day I got a big pile of money and burned it. Sorry, I mean I joined a gym. CELIA PACQUOLA I like to go to the library, get all the books on feng shui out, and put them back in the wrong section. KARL CHANDLER

Stotan!

Author: Chris Crutcher
Publisher: Harper Collins
ISBN: 006196851X
Category : Young Adult Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 276

Book Description
Stotan: A cross between a Stoic and a Spartin It's the last swimming season for Walker, Nortie, Lion, and Jeff, and their coach is building their self-discipline in a grueling four-hour-a-day test of stamina designed to bring them to the outer edge of their capabilities. As it turns out, Stotan Week is also the week in which secrets are revealed, and the four friends must draw upon their new strengths for an endurance they never knew they'd need.

Black Swan Green

Author: David Mitchell
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 158836528X
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 306

Book Description
By the New York Times bestselling author of The Bone Clocks and Cloud Atlas | Longlisted for the Man Booker Prize Selected by Time as One of the Ten Best Books of the Year | A New York Times Notable Book | Named One of the Best Books of the Year by The Washington Post Book World, The Christian Science Monitor, Rocky Mountain News, and Kirkus Reviews | A Los Angeles Times Book Prize Finalist | Winner of the ALA Alex Award | Finalist for the Costa Novel Award From award-winning writer David Mitchell comes a sinewy, meditative novel of boyhood on the cusp of adulthood and the old on the cusp of the new. Black Swan Green tracks a single year in what is, for thirteen-year-old Jason Taylor, the sleepiest village in muddiest Worcestershire in a dying Cold War England, 1982. But the thirteen chapters, each a short story in its own right, create an exquisitely observed world that is anything but sleepy. A world of Kissingeresque realpolitik enacted in boys’ games on a frozen lake; of “nightcreeping” through the summer backyards of strangers; of the tabloid-fueled thrills of the Falklands War and its human toll; of the cruel, luscious Dawn Madden and her power-hungry boyfriend, Ross Wilcox; of a certain Madame Eva van Outryve de Crommelynck, an elderly bohemian emigré who is both more and less than she appears; of Jason’s search to replace his dead grandfather’s irreplaceable smashed watch before the crime is discovered; of first cigarettes, first kisses, first Duran Duran LPs, and first deaths; of Margaret Thatcher’s recession; of Gypsies camping in the woods and the hysteria they inspire; and, even closer to home, of a slow-motion divorce in four seasons. Pointed, funny, profound, left-field, elegiac, and painted with the stuff of life, Black Swan Green is David Mitchell’s subtlest and most effective achievement to date. Praise for Black Swan Green “[David Mitchell has created] one of the most endearing, smart, and funny young narrators ever to rise up from the pages of a novel. . . . The always fresh and brilliant writing will carry readers back to their own childhoods. . . . This enchanting novel makes us remember exactly what it was like.”—The Boston Globe “[David Mitchell is a] prodigiously daring and imaginative young writer. . . . As in the works of Thomas Pynchon and Herman Melville, one feels the roof of the narrative lifted off and oneself in thrall.”—Time

Boyhoodlum

Author: Anson Cameron
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781458765482
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 448

Book Description
You know those childhood memoirs that tell of the innocence of youth, of a gentle past when boys and girls were adorable and agreeable, respectful of their elders, and spoke only when spoken to? This isn't one of those. Boyhoodlum is the hilarious confession of an ingeniously devious and destructive boy. In the late 1960s and early '70s, Anson Cameron waged guerrilla war on his hometown in country Victoria. When he wasn't blowing his family TV to smithereens, he was electrocuting a friend's mother; when he wasn't raining expletives on a genial deaf neighbour, he was raining missiles on classical music fans. And in his leisure hours, he found time to join a Wee Club, stockpiling an ocean of urine for future use. Knowing he was destined for greatness, young Anson saw no reason to keep his self - importance to Napoleonic levels. At high school, a posse of hirsute male teachers attempted to put the errant lad in his place. But would the 'wonderbeards' be able to quell a born entertainer and agitator? Brilliantly evoking an era in which the Cisco Kid, Valiant Chargers and the lethal powers of a home - made shanghai reigned supreme, Anson Cameron's riotous memoir is a crash - investigator's report on how not to be a boy.

Underground

Author: Suelette Dreyfus
Publisher: Canongate Books
ISBN: 085786260X
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 517

Book Description
Suelette Dreyfus and her co-author, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, tell the extraordinary true story of the computer underground, and the bizarre lives and crimes of an elite ring of international hackers who took on the establishment. Spanning three continents and a decade of high level infiltration, they created chaos amongst some of the world's biggest and most powerful organisations, including NASA and the US military. Brilliant and obsessed, many of them found themselves addicted to hacking and phreaking. Some descended into drugs and madness, others ended up in jail. As riveting as the finest detective novel and meticulously researched, Underground follows the hackers through their crimes, their betrayals, the hunt, raids and investigations. It is a gripping tale of the digital underground.

The Rapture of the Nerds

Author: Cory Doctorow
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 0765329107
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 353

Book Description
From the two defining personalities of post-cyberpunk SF, a brilliant collaboration to rival 1987's The Difference Engine by William Gibson and Bruce Sterling

Why Do We Quote?

Author: Ruth Finnegan
Publisher: Open Book Publishers
ISBN: 1906924333
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 350

Book Description
Quoting is all around us. But do we really know what it means? How do people actually quote today, and how did our present systems come about? This book brings together a down-to-earth account of contemporary quoting with an examination of the comparative and historical background that lies behind it and the characteristic way that quoting links past and present, the far and the near.Drawing from anthropology, cultural history, folklore, cultural studies, sociolinguistics, literary studies and the ethnography of speaking, Ruth Finnegan 's fascinating study sets our present conventions into crosscultural and historical perspective. She traces the curious history of quotation marks, examines the long tradition of quotation collections with their remarkable recycling across the centuries, and explores the uses of quotation in literary, visual and oral traditions. The book tracks the changing defi nitions and control of quoting over the millennia and in doing so throws new light on ideas such as imitation, allusion, authorship, originality and plagiarism .

Is That a Fish in Your Ear?

Author: David Bellos
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 0865478724
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 385

Book Description
A New York Times Notable Book for 2011 One of The Economist's 2011 Books of the Year People speak different languages, and always have. The Ancient Greeks took no notice of anything unless it was said in Greek; the Romans made everyone speak Latin; and in India, people learned their neighbors' languages—as did many ordinary Europeans in times past (Christopher Columbus knew Italian, Portuguese, and Castilian Spanish as well as the classical languages). But today, we all use translation to cope with the diversity of languages. Without translation there would be no world news, not much of a reading list in any subject at college, no repair manuals for cars or planes; we wouldn't even be able to put together flat-pack furniture. Is That a Fish in Your Ear? ranges across the whole of human experience, from foreign films to philosophy, to show why translation is at the heart of what we do and who we are. Among many other things, David Bellos asks: What's the difference between translating unprepared natural speech and translating Madame Bovary? How do you translate a joke? What's the difference between a native tongue and a learned one? Can you translate between any pair of languages, or only between some? What really goes on when world leaders speak at the UN? Can machines ever replace human translators, and if not, why? But the biggest question Bellos asks is this: How do we ever really know that we've understood what anybody else says—in our own language or in another? Surprising, witty, and written with great joie de vivre, this book is all about how we comprehend other people and shows us how, ultimately, translation is another name for the human condition.

THE MAGIC PUDDING

Author: NORMAN LINDSAY
Publisher: Lulu.com
ISBN: 132968396X
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 147

Book Description
A magic pudding who changes from steak and kidney to jam roll and apple dumpling in seconds. A walking, talking dessert that never runs out of pleasing things to eat. A koala bear, named Bunyip Bluegum, A sailor named Bill Barnacle, and Sam Sawnoff the penguin have a wonderful hilarious magical adventure defending the Pudding against thieves who want it for themselves.

The Belgariad

Author: David Eddings
Publisher: Del Rey Books
ISBN: 9780345456328
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 1127

Book Description
A two-volume compilation presents the five previously published novels in the epic saga which begins with the theft of the protective Orb from Riva.