LAUGH & RESIST
Humor as rebellion. Satire, absurdism, and comedy that punctures power.
About this shelf
After you see through it. After you feel it. After you've laughed at it and refused to be flattened by it. Then what?
Make Something Better is the shelf for building — for the books that take seriously the question of what alternatives actually look like when they're being lived rather than theorized. Radical pedagogy books that document what happens when you stop treating education as compliance training. Community organizing theory that came out of real campaigns, real losses, real wins. Books about film as activism and theatre as weapon and art-as-action — not as inspiration porn, but as documentation of creative work that changed material conditions for real people.
This isn't utopia. These books are full of failure, revision, conflict, and the specific difficulty of doing collective work with other humans. That's what makes them useful. The builders and healers on this shelf didn't have a clean blueprint. They built something anyway — and wrote about what they learned.
Creative resistance is not a consolation prize for people who couldn't do "real" politics. It is a technology for organizing attention, building shared language, and making it possible for people to imagine something different. That's the work of this shelf: not telling you what the future should look like, but showing you what people have already built, and what it took.
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She tried heteronormativity. It had a secret. She had to decide.
READ – REFLECT → RESIST
$18.00 MSRPDisappoint Me
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Detransition, Baby
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The President's son and a prince. The world finds out. It's fine.
READ – REFLECT → RESIST
$16.99 MSRPRed, White & Royal Blue
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Illegally Yours
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Hyperbole and a Half
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Arrested for saying true things onstage. They won. He didn't stop.
READ – REFLECT → RESIST
$18.99 MSRPHow to Talk Dirty and Influence People
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Bad Feminist
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We Are Never Meeting in Real Life
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Thirty years teaching New York kids. He survived by storytelling.
READ – REFLECT → RESIST
$18.99 MSRPTeacher Man
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Born Standing Up
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The Comedians
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The Daily Show (The Book)
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Sick in the Head
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Improv Nation
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Impro for Storytellers
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Comedy Comedy Comedy Drama
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Bossypants
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I Must Say
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Me Talk Pretty One Day
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He found the last ones. Some are gone now. He was funny about it.
READ – REFLECT → RESIST
$16.78 MSRPLast Chance to See
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Look Inside No One Is Talking About This
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Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
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The pandemic made everyone repeat their routines until they died.
READ – REFLECT → RESIST
$19.00 MSRPSeverance
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Her boyfriend was a conspiracy theorist. Then she became one too.
READ – REFLECT → RESIST
$16.95 MSRPFake Accounts
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The Picture of Dorian Gray
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A farce about identity. Written by a man they were destroying for his.
READ – REFLECT → RESIST
$13.99 MSRPThe Importance of Being Earnest
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America (The Book)
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Theme park. Corporate memos. People getting destroyed. Very funny.
READ – REFLECT → RESIST
$17.00 MSRPCivilWarLand in Bad Decline
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Mother Night
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If on a winter's night a traveler
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The dictator is so old nobody remembers before him. One sentence.
READ – REFLECT → RESIST
$17.99 MSRPThe Autumn of the Patriarch
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The Nose and Other Stories
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Don Quixote
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The True Story of the Three Little Pigs
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Holes
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The Bad Beginning (A Series of Unfortunate Events, Book the First)
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A bored boy drives through a tollbooth. The other side is worth it.
READ – REFLECT → RESIST
$8.99 MSRPThe Phantom Tollbooth
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Devil on the Cross
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A medieval scholar in New Orleans. At war with the 20th century.
READ – REFLECT → RESIST
$17.00 MSRPA Confederacy of Dunces
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The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
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The Good Soldier Švejk
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Candide
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Revolution for the Hell of It
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A Modest Proposal
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Look Who's Back
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Yesteryear
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The White Boy Shuffle
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Catch-22
$6.00$19.99Very Good • Paperback -
Slaughterhouse-Five
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White Noise
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The Sellout
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Trust Me, I’m Lying
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Xala
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The Master and Margarita
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My Uncle Napoleon
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A Case of Exploding Mangoes
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Thick: And Other Essays
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The Book of Delights
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Fantastic Mr Fox
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A Murri woman comes home to save her family's land from a prison.
READ – REFLECT → RESIST
$20.99 MSRPToo Much Lip
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The Year of the Hare
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Sharon and My Mother-in-Law
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Funny in Farsi
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She loves her convenience store job. Society has a problem with that.
READ – REFLECT → RESIST
$17.00 MSRPConvenience Store Woman
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Born a Crime
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A dissolute Nobel laureate accidentally becomes the face of clean energy.
READ – REFLECT → RESIST
$16.95 MSRPSolar
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A religion built on lies. A substance that ends the world. Both feel true.
READ – REFLECT → RESIST
$20.00 MSRPCat's Cradle
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The Man Who Spoke Snakish
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