Our Dumb Century

The staff of The Onion presents a satirical collection of mock headlines and news stories, including an account of the Pentagon's development of an A-bomb-resistant desk for schoolchildren.

OUR DUMB WORLD is the world's most comprehensive fake atlas: a repository of all known information about the planet Earth (except where covered by clouds). In late 2007 the hardcover edition became one of the hottest books of the holiday season, entertaining and offending hundreds of thousands of readers around the globe. This new, easy-to-carry paperback edition is perfect for the intrepid traveler to any of the world's exotic locales--from Afghanistan, "Allah's Cat Box," to Ukraine, "the Bridebasket of Europe," to the USA's own Nevada, "Where Everyone's a Loser." Packed with beautiful full-color maps and framed with inaccurate essays about all the world's peoples and places, OUR DUMB WORLD is a gut-busting send-up in which no nation escapes unscathed. "Bottom line: laughed my head off." --Deirdre Donahue, USA Today

Are you a witless cretin with no reason to live? Would you like to know more about every piece of knowledge ever? Do you have cash? Then congratulations, because just in time for the death of the print industry as we know it comes the final book ever published, and the only one you will ever need: The Onion's compendium of all things known. Replete with an astonishing assemblage of facts, illustrations, maps, charts, threats, blood, and additional fees to edify even the most simple-minded book-buyer, The Onion Book of Known Knowledge is packed with valuable information -- such as the life stages of an Aunt; places to kill one's self in Utica, New York; and the dimensions of a female bucket, or "pail." With hundreds of entries for all 27 letters of the alphabet, The Onion Book of Known Knowledge must be purchased immediately to avoid the sting of eternal ignorance.

"The Onion is laugh-out-loud, go-tell-your-friends, get-angry-you-didn't-think-of-it funny." -Conan O'Brien "Outside of maybe Dario Fo, an Italian who few are sure exists, the Onion people make the most consistently perfect and excoriating social commentary we currently have. But will those Nobel bastards honor them, too? Only God, our merciless and just God, knows." -Dave Eggers "The funniest publication in the United States." -The New Yorker "This publication is tasteless and destructive to our shared values. Read it for yourself and you'll see what I mean. Seriously, what else could make me laugh-much less laugh uproariously-while being offended week after week after week?" -Al Gore "The Onion is the funniest thing in news since Dan Rather's spooky stare." -Matt Groening "Brutal satire that rushes into the far reaches of race, class, sexuality, and culture where many publications-and critics-fear to tread." -Chicago Tribune "The Onion, unlike any other entity in our media culture, offers a refreshingly honest look at our complicated life." -Ken Burns

The Onion has quickly become the world's most popular humor publication, misinforming half a million readers a week with one-of-a-kind social satire both in print (on newsstands nationwide) and online from its remote office in Madison, Wisconsin. Witness the march of history as Editor-in-Chief Scott Dikkers and The Onion's award-winning writing staff present the twentieth century like you've never seen it before.

Covers That Matter For People Who Don't. From America's Finest News Source comes a compilation of the most important, most influential, and glossiest magazine covers ever produced by the hand of humankind. Seen by tens of billions worldwide, these are the unforgettable Onion Magazine covers that altered the course of human history and radically redefined your trivial life anew every weekend. Profound philosophical questions, the thoughts of leading cultural luminaries, harsh truths of existence, remorseless personal attacks -- you will encounter full-color graphical representations of all of these within this handsome volume. Whether you are a connoisseur of pretty pictures or are new to looking at images, THE ONION MAGAZINE: THE ICONIC COVERS THAT TRANSFORMED AN UNDESERVING WORLD is sure to give you, the feebleminded consumer, far more pleasure than you have any earthly right to experience.

"Like all my favorite art, these paintings bring out that covetous feeling. I want to wear them, dance to them, show them off as an example of how life feels to me: dirty, dumb, terrifying, spiritual, and so funny."—Miranda July "In a time of ironic detachment, Margaux Williamson is a painter of extreme candor, but the violence of her vision is cut with wonder and love. Sometimes she recalls Phillip Guston, sometimes she's like a Pittsburgh-born van Gogh; usually she reminds me of nobody at all. Seeing as she sees feels like waking up."—Ben Lerner From the artist the Toronto Star called "one of the best artists of her generation," and whose 2010 movie Teenager Hamlet was praised by the likes of James Franco and William Shakespeare scholar Stephen Greenblatt, comes a breakthrough work for a world where the image of a painting on one's desktop is as real as the painting hanging in the gallery. Margaux Williamson has conceived of a place that never existed, called The Road at the Top of the World Museum, located in the far north, and populated it with her most accomplished paintings yet. With essays by Chris Kraus, Leanne Shapton, David Balzer, and Mark Greif, and reproductions of eighty paintings, this, her first book, transcends the boundary between the authentic and the imaginary, and collapses the distinction between art show, museum catalog, and document of something astonishing that never was. Margaux Williamson was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and lives in Toronto, Ontario. She's co-author of the cultural criticism website Back to the World.

The Onion is the world's most popular humor periodical. Its first book, Our Dumb Century, was a New York Times #1 best-seller and winner of the 1999 Thurber Prize for American Humor. Now The Onion returns with Volume One of the paper's greatest, most hard-hitting stories, including: --Clinton Deploys Vowels to Bosnia: Operation Vowel Storm Will Make Countless Bosnian Names More Pronounceable --Jesus Christ Returns to NBA --Microsoft Patents Ones, Zeroes --I Can't Stand My Filthy Hippy Owner by Thunder the Ferret