Funny books to read and buy for Christmas gifts

Funny books of 2024

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Books guaranteed to make you laugh

The Dinner Party

From the hilarious Booker-shortlisted author of To Rise Again at a Decent Hour 
 
'He reflected in future retrospect on the evening and foretold every gesture, every word. "I can't do it," he said. "I can predict everything that will happen from the moment they arrive to the little kiss on the cheek goodbye and I just can't goddamn do it."' 
 
The Dinner Party immerses us in the comic and strange realities of modern life, as we journey through the lives of the unlovable, the unloved, and those who love too much: Jack, who nervously tries to befriend the surly removal man by buying him a latte and a croissant; Sarah, who endlessly imagines how her evening would have been better had she only chosen a different restaurant; Joe, who spends a night alone at the office and surreptitiously starts to rearrange his colleagues' belongings. 
 
These are stories about the infinite possibilities of a person's life, from an agonizingly funny and original writer.

Enormously enjoyable . . . Ferris really nails contemporary insecurity

The stories are constructed with great care, combining beady-eyed observation with farce, black comedy and occasional moments of lyricism

In this egregiously entertaining collection of short stories, Ferris tackles the most enervating range of emotions - despair, doubt, anxiety, humiliation - as his doleful characters trawl New York

A magnificent black carnival of discord and delusion ... For some accomplished novelists-and Ferris is one of the best of our day-short stories are mere doodles, warm ups or warm downs, slight variations on themes better addressed at length. Not so for Ferris. Dynamic with speed, yet rich with novelistic density, his stories make "The Dinner Party" a full-fledged feast, especially for readers with a particular taste for the many flavors of American crazy.

Ferris's three novels have earned him a reputation as a high-concept high-wire artist, always working the line between comedy and tragedy, the domestic and the outlandish. His stories, by comparison, are compact gems of timing and everyday absurdity, and finally, here they are in one place. Hollywood satire, marriage-ending secrets, cracked minds, broken families: Ferris renders contemporary life as a parade of sad clowns.

New York Magazine, Top 10 Spring Books preview

A collection that show[s] humanity at its most awkward and insightful.

New York Observer, 10 Most Anticipated Books of Spring

Ferris has a sure hand when it comes to the nuances of interpersonal relationships. He knows the thin line between awkward and easy, and when silence between two people can be a sign of strain or comfort. Ferris walks this territory so well that we often see our own complicated selves reflected in his writing... Though Ferris' assured collection may seem laced with hints of despair, the stories are full and rounded, sad but often also tinged with humor and rich in empathy.

Ferris has mastered a kind of fictional sucker punch, and he'll get you every time.

[These stories] explore the fraying psychologies of their protagonists by way of dark humor and understated tragedy. In the excellent, surreal title story, the fissures in a childless couple's marriage become unbridgeable divides after their close friends fail to attend a dinner party... [they] contain moments of sharp levity and intense insight, reminders of the heights the author can achieve when he is able to sustain his immense talent

One of the most anticipated books of 2017... the Dinner Party explores an array of emotions from a deeply human perspective.

Ferris is an incisive observer, and his descriptions of even the most quotidian situations are elegant and fresh

Ferris finesses the line between tragedy and comedy, and his sly wit often surfaces in sarcastic, offbeat ways . . . The Dinner Party provides a fine showcase for his work

This season's standout short-story collections are masterful exercises in brevity, proving that sometimes less really is more.... Novelist Joshua Ferris returns with his first, highly anticipated story collection. Each entry showcases his customary wit and understanding

[With] flashes of transcendence ... Ferris's specialist area is modern American crassness

Ferris' characters may be flawed, but his writing is flawless

Each of these stories is a well-crafted, tightly wound piece of short fiction that often springs with a delightful, sometimes moving precision

Ferris wittily skewers both middle-class social life, and its would-be dissenters. He has a brilliantly sharp eye for the manners and mores of 21st-century metropolitan society, and is a master of discomfort. . . Like F Scott Fitzgerald before him, Joshua Ferris shines an unforgiving light on the jittery pursuit of happiness, and 'the growing anxiety of never arriving at what was always just out of reach'

At turns arresting and hilarious. Ferris excavates relationships, interactions, missteps, and misunderstandings to form a collection of work you'll want to return to again and again

Most of the characters are comparatively sane, but no less deliciously ghastly

Anxiety, self-consciousness and humiliation are the default inner states of the characters in these 11 stories

Joshua Ferris was born in Illinois in 1974. He is the author of Then We Came to the End (2007), which was nominated for the National Book Award and longlisted for the Guardian First Book Award, and the highly acclaimed The Unnamed. In 2010 he was selected for the New Yorker's prestigious '20 under 40' list. In 2014 To Rise Again at a Decent Hour won the Dylan Thomas Prize and was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. He lives in upstate New York.

'He reflected in future retrospect on the evening and foretold every gesture, every word. "I can't do it," he said. "I can predict everything that will happen from the moment they arrive to the little kiss on the cheek goodbye and I just can't goddamn do it."' 
 
The Dinner Party immerses us in the comic and strange realities of modern life, as we journey through the lives of the unlovable, the unloved, and those who love too much: Jack, who nervously tries to befriend the surly removal man by buying him a latte and a croissant; Sarah, who endlessly imagines how her evening would have been better had she only chosen a different restaurant; Joe, who spends a night alone at the office and surreptitiously starts to rearrange his colleagues' belongings. 
 
These are stories about the infinite possibilities of a person's life, from an agonizingly funny and original writer.

To Rise Again at a Decent Hour

*** Winner of the Dylan Thomas Prize 2014 and shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2014 *** 
 
'The Catch-22 of dentistry' Stephen King 
 
Joshua Ferris's dazzling novel To Rise Again at a Decent Hour is about the meaning of life, the certainty of death, and the importance of good oral hygiene. 
 
There's nothing like a dental chair to remind a man that he's alone in the world . . . 
 
Paul O'Rourke - dentist extraordinaire, reluctant New Yorker, avowed atheist, disaffected Red Sox fan, and a connoisseur of the afternoon mochaccino - is a man out of touch with modern life. While his dental practice occupies his days, his nights are filled with darker thoughts, as he alternately marvels at and rails against the optimism of the rest of humanity. 
 
So it goes, until someone begins to impersonate Paul online. What began as an outrageous violation of privacy soon becomes something far more soul-frightening: the possibility that the virtual 'Paul' might be a better version of the man in the flesh . . . 
 
'Frenetic, very funny, it confirms Ferris as a rising star of American fiction' Mail on Sunday 
 
'Glorious . . . A very, very funny novel' BBC Radio 4 Saturday Review 
 
'Dismayingly funny in the way that only really serious books can be' Guardian 
 
Joshua Ferris was born in Illinois in 1974. He is the author of Then We Came to the End (2007), which was nominated for the National Book Award and longlisted for the Guardian First Book Award, and the highly acclaimed The Unnamed. In 2010 he was selected for the New Yorker's prestigious '20 under 40' list. In 2014 To Rise Again At A Decent Hour won the Dylan Thomas Prize and was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. Joshua Ferris lives in New York.

A genuinely funny book. Not funny in the wry-smirk way of so many 'comic' novels. Actually funny

Glorious . . . A very, very funny novel. If misanthropy's going to come from anywhere it's from a lifetime's confrontation with halitosis

Funny in the way that only really serious books can be

Genuine, funny, tragic and never dull. It'll also leave you flossing with a vengeance

Smart, sad, hilarious and eloquent . . . a writer at the top of his game and surpassing the promise of his celebrated debut

This is one of the funniest, saddest, sweetest novels I've read since Then We Came to the End. When historians try to understand our strange, contradictory era, they would be wise to consult To Rise Again at a Decent Hour. It captures what it is to be alive in early 21st-century America like nothing else I've read

Very funny [and] highly entertaining . . . Josh Ferris is a gifted satirist and very much in touch with the fear and paranoia that undercut US society

Geek-smart prose and wry humour . . . hilarious

Joshua Ferris has proved his astonishing ability to spin gold from ordinary air . . . As brave and adept as any writer out there

It's a pleasure watching this young writer confidently range from the registers of broad punchline comedy to genuine spiritual depth . . . There's a happy side effect to reading the novel, as well: If you're a backslider like I was, it will guilt you into flossing again

An engrossing and hilariously bleak novel about a dentist being shook out of his comfortable atheism . . . This splintering of the self hasn't been performed in fiction so neatly since Philip Roth's "Operation Shylock'

Ferris [is] a Virgil of the disaffected . . . This is the novel's peculiar brilliance, to uncover its existential stakes in the most mundane tasks

Laugh-out-loud hilarious, combining Woody Allen's New York nihilism with an Ivy League vocabulary

Returns Ferris to the comedy of the workplace . . . his writing is so fresh and modern - a comedian's sense of timing mixed with a social critic's knack for shaking the bushes

It is completely wonderful . . . Good god he is talented

Brilliant . . . witty . . . passages of flashing comedy that sound like a stand-up theologian suffering a nervous breakdown

Joshua Ferris excels at mordantly comic novels about ordinary people in crisis . . . he writes with brio about the modern condition

Compelling but never cheap, inventive but never obscure . . . Ferris has secured his status as exactly the sort of mainstream literary novelist American fiction needs

A hoot . . . There's a tincture of Pynchonian paranoia à la The Crying of Lot 49 here, and a dash, too, of the kitchen-sink comic winsomeness that the Dave Eggers generation brought to US literary fiction

This is fierce, pithy, unforgiving satire, taking a sledgehammer to all-American cracker-barrel homeliness. Its comic energy is fuelled by disgust and exasperation, in the tradition of Roth and Heller and John Kennedy O'Toole. But Ferris is also a dab hand at more delicate humour, every bit as contemporary . . . Ferris is very funny . . . His voice is unique

Joshua Ferris has been heralded as one of America's sharpest observers of 21st-century life and, reading his third novel, it's easy to see why. To Rise Again At A Decent Hour has the immediacy and the trenchant satire of a brilliant stand-up routine as well as the big ideas and the in-depth research of a brilliant academic paper

To Rise Again at a Decent Hour is a funny novel, by turns ha-ha, peculiar and, like O'Rourke himself, suspended between heaven and earth

A riotously funny novel, whose narrator is engagingly out of step with the world around him. As engrossing as it is uproarious.

Ferris is famously good at writing about the workplace . . . and very good at portraying a man whose job is fixing teeth

People who can make comedy from human tragedy are rare and wonderful. It's an incredibly hard thing to do and takes a kind of genius to deliver it on the page

Peter Florence, founder of Hay Literary Festival

Introducing Paul O'Rourke: New Yorker, dentist and reluctant non-believer. Modern life disappoints him, and love never solves any of his problems. Then someone steals his identity and starts impersonating Paul online. A cruel invasion of privacy, the real horror is yet to come: this virtual 'Paul' might just be a better, happier person than the real deal. 
 
Anxious to find out who is responsible for this disturbing turn of events, Paul embarks on a quest which will see him confront the meaning of life, the inevitability of death and the importance of good oral hygiene.

The Unnamed

Joshua Ferris's The Unnamed has been hailed as 'the first great book of the decade' (GQ). 
 
In an America gone awry with strange weather, New York lawyer Tim Farnsworth suffers a peculiar affliction: the inability to stop walking. While his wife, Jane, struggles to keep their family together in the face of the unfathomable, Tim alone must battle to survive pitiless surroundings, encounters with hostile strangers, and the unrelenting demands of his own body. These challenges force Tim to ask life's most pressing questions, which he answers in a final return on foot across country to reunite with his wife and daughter. 
 
Stripped of all defences, and the sense of hope that lies at the very heart of the American dream, Farnsworth is compelled to confront the terrifying reality of what it is to be a human being. 
 
'A writer almost uniquely in tune with modern life . . . Ferris's flashes of brilliance are many' Evening Standard 
 
'Original, affecting. An almost unbearable love story, between remissions of intense connection and the human inevitability of parting, between the haven of marriage and all that lies beyond' Observer 
 
'A stunner, an unnerving portrait of a man stripped of civilization's defenses' New Yorker 
 
Joshua Ferris was born in Illinois in 1974. He is the author of Then We Came to the End (2007), which was nominated for the National Book Award and longlisted for the Guardian First Book Award, and the highly acclaimed The Unnamed. In 2010 he was selected for the New Yorker's prestigious '20 under 40' list. His most recent novel, To Rise Again at a Decent Hour, was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2014 and the Dylan Thomas Prize 2014. He lives in New York.

A stunner, an unnerving portrait of a man stripped of civilization's defences

A writer almost uniquely in tune with modern life . . . Ferris's flashes of brilliance are many

Original, affecting. An almost unbearable love story, between remissions of intense connection and the human inevitability of parting, between the haven of marriage and all that lies beyond

At once riveting, horrifying and deeply sad. Fiction with the force of an avalanche, snowballing unstoppably

Hugely readable, engaging, original. What an imagination - and what a memorable conceit

As hard to pin down as its hero, yet as readable as The Corrections

Immensely readable, a grand American novel

Seizes readers by the lapels with a story that feels serious and mysterious ... He has teased ordinary circumstances into something extraordinary, which is exactly what we want our fiction writers to do

Ferris writes hauntingly on the fragility of our minds and on the compulsions that drive us, despite our best intentions

Brave and masterful. A writer of the first order

In an America gone awry with strange weather, New York lawyer Tim Farnsworth suffers a peculiar affliction: the inability to stop walking. While his wife, Jane, struggles to keep their family together in the face of the unfathomable, Tim alone must battle to survive pitiless surroundings, encounters with hostile strangers, and the unrelenting demands of his own body. These challenges force Tim to ask life's most pressing questions, which he answers in a final return on foot across country to reunite with his wife and daughter. 
 
Stripped of all defences, and the sense of hope that lies at the very heart of the American dream, Farnsworth is compelled to confront the terrifying reality of what it is to be a human being.

Then We Came to the End

High-visibility national press advertising will capitalise on the fantastic praise received on hardback publication and position this book as the unmissable paperback of 2008

A HILARIOUS SATIRE THAT SHOWS OFFICE DYNAMICS AT THEIR MOST PETTY AND PROFOUND FROM THE BOOKER PRIZE-SHORTLISTED AUTHOR, JOSHUA FERRIS 
 
They spend their days - and too many of their nights - at work. Away from friends and family, they share a stretch of stained carpet with a group of strangers they call colleagues. 
 
There's Chris, clinging to his ergonomic chair; Lynn, the boss, whose breast cancer everyone pretends not to talk about; Carl, secretly taking someone else's medication; Marcia, whose hair is stuck in the eighties; and Benny, who's just - well, just Benny. Amidst the boredom, redundancies, water cooler moments, meetings, flirtations and pure rage, life is happening, to their great surprise, all around them. 
 
Then We Came to the End is about sitting all morning next to someone you cross the road to avoid at lunch. It's the story of your life and mine. 
 
*Joshua Ferris' mind-blowing new book, A Calling for Charlie Barnes, is available to pre-order now.* 
 
'Very funny, intense and exhilarating . . . For the first time in fiction, it has truly captured the way we work' The Times 
 
'As dazzling as Franzen's The Corrections and as confident as Tartt's The Secret History . . . Exceptional, very funny' Daily Telegraph 
 
'Slick, sophisticated and very funny, Ferris's cracking debut has modern Everyman fighting for his identity in an increasingly impersonal world' Daily Mail

Outstanding, hugely satisfying, exceptionally well-executed  . . . An incisive, urgent, funny and snappily written novel

As impressively confident as Donna Tartt's The Secret History and as technically dazzling as Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections . . . Exceptional, funny, radical

Brilliant, funny, stomach-turningly accurate

They spend their days - and too many of their nights - at work. Away from friends and family, they share a stretch of stained carpet with a group of strangers they call colleagues. 
 
There's Chris Yop, clinging to his ergonomic chair; Lynn Mason, the boss, whose breast cancer everyone pretends not to talk about; Carl Garbedian, secretly taking someone else's medication; Marcia Dwyer, whose hair is stuck in the eighties; and Benny, who's just - well, just Benny. Amidst the boredom, redundancies, water cooler moments, meetings, flirtations and pure rage, life is happening, to their great surprise, all around them. 
 
Then We Came to the End is about sitting all morning next to someone you cross the road to avoid at lunch. It's the story of your life and mine.

Joshua Ferris

A hilarious skewering of the American Dream by the man who must be the funniest writer we have

This is a fine American novel about family, love, and a decent but flawed man trying to be better. In dark times like these, I can't recommend this book too highly

Splendid . . . it is hard to be genuinely funny in a novel but the final 50 or so pages, in which Charlie's family confront Jake Barnes, the fourth wall-breaking narrator of the novel, over the content of the tell-all memoir, was easily the most hilarious chapter of a novel I read all year

Until I read A Calling For Charlie Barnes, Joshua Ferris's virtuosic third novel, I couldn't recall the last time a book caused me to both laugh and gasp aloud. Madly funny and bristling with intelligence, this is the story of a man in later life wallowing in the detritus of the American Dream and of the children witnessing his decline

Simultaneously narratively courageous and utterly hilarious . . . where it leaves the reader feels special and unique

In Ferris's admirably risk-taking hands, this novel becomes so much more than simply another story of failed American dreams. Ferris has made himself into the leading writer of the American workplace . . . He understands both its absurdities (and this is another very funny book) and its rewards, but most of all he understands how it shapes modern America

Ferris could write enthralling realist fiction in his sleep but it's the ideas and formal ingenuity that really set this novel apart . . . [he considers] the role of storytelling in families, the myths we create and the possibility that there is no such thing as telling it straight

Brilliant, funny, heartbreaking . . . Family, memory, ambition and death, all told with dervishing glee. Not just a daredevil of a novel, but something truly new

Ferris is on his finest deadpan form here, skewering contemporary America and the shallow values it embodied in the heat of the 2008 financial crash

Inventive and witty, tender and wise. It's a portrait of life, love and death, and much else besides

This is the story of one disappointed idealist told by another, of one unreliable narrator described by another, and it is animated by filial love . . . funny, moving - and surprising

This novel is funny - Ferris has lovely comic timing and a great way with the sheer silliness of a family's mental and physical bric-a-brac - and very moving

Dazzling . . . A more tender novel than Ferris's others, but that doesn't keep it from being murderously funny . . . [he has found] precisely the right way to meld memoir with satire, to do this with bracing originality and to keep heads spinning from this novel's first page to its last . . . he's risen to the top of his game

Funny, moving, and formally a work of genius, A Calling for Charlie Barnes is quite literally the book Joshua Ferris was born to write.

Garth Risk Hallberg, author of City on Fire

Dazzling. Mind-blowing. About as much fun as you can have without risking arrest

A deeply funny, very moving book . . . Ferris's hijinks are serious; his play is profound. There is magic in these pages

A touching tale about the love between fathers and sons

A passionate, well-constructed, often hilarious and, at times, profound plunge into grief, both civic and intimate, as well as a culmination (so far) of the literary explorations he has been undertaking since he arrived

A Calling for Charlie Barnes is wonderful: fast and deep, urgent and brilliant . . . A hilarious, intimate, and scathing takedown of so many American vanities

He has proved that he's one of the best American authors of comic fiction working today. His humour is on full display but so are his intelligence and compassion. It's a masterpiece that shines a revealing light on both family and fiction itself

Ferris's work cuts to the heart of who we are by focusing very painfully on who one man was . . . Consider this book not just a work of grief or love or memoir, then, but a work of hope, too.

A warmly bullish but measured and reflectful voice that brings out all the humour and wisdom of the novel

Intriguing and intelligent . . . the humour throughout is exquisitely judged . . . and the descent into metafiction, the novel's true crowning glory, is extremely well done without ever feeling hammy or clunky

A relentlessly self-reflective book

Joshua Ferris has proved his astonishing ability to spin gold from ordinary air . . . As brave and adept as any writer out there

New York Times Book Review on To Rise Again at a Decent Hour

Not too many authors have written the Great American Office Novel... Then We Came to the End feels like a readymade classic of the genre. . . . A truly affecting novel about work, trust, love, and loneliness

Michael Upchurch, Seattle Times on Then We Came to the End

Dismayingly funny in the way that only really serious books can be

Guardian, on 'To Rise Again at a Decent Hour'

Brilliant, funny, stomach-turningly accurate

Very funny, intense and exhilarating

Charlie Barnes is a mid-century man devoted to his newspaper and his landline. But Charlie is about to get dragged into our troubled age by his storyteller son, who has a different idea of him than he has of himself. Then there are his other children, his ex-wives, present wife, business clients, friends and acquaintances, all of whom have their competing opinions of Charlie. 
 
A striver, romantic, and thoroughgoing capitalist, he's blindsided by the Great Recession and a dose of bad news. Rethinking his entire life, he starts to wonder: what makes a man real? What makes him good? And how does the story we tell about ourselves line up with the lives that we actually live?

Joshua Ferris

Praise for A Calling for Charlie Barnes

A hilarious skewering of the American Dream by the man who must be the funniest writer we have

This is a fine American novel about family, love, and a decent but flawed man trying to be better. In dark times like these, I can't recommend this book too highly

Splendid . . . it is hard to be genuinely funny in a novel but the final 50 or so pages, in which Charlie's family confront Jake Barnes, the fourth wall-breaking narrator of the novel, over the content ...

A hilarious skewering of the American Dream by the man who must be the funniest writer we have

This is a fine American novel about family, love, and a decent but flawed man trying to be better. In dark times like these, I can't recommend this book too highly

Splendid . . . it is hard to be genuinely funny in a novel but the final 50 or so pages, in which Charlie's family confront Jake Barnes, the fourth wall-breaking narrator of the novel, over the content ...

A hilarious skewering of the American Dream by the man who must be the funniest writer we have

This is a fine American novel about family, love, and a decent but flawed man trying to be better. In dark times like these, I can't recommend this book too highly

Splendid . . . it is hard to be genuinely funny in a novel but the final 50 or so pages, in which Charlie's family confront Jake Barnes, the fourth wall-breaking narrator of the novel, over the content ...

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