Satire Comedy

In this astonishing debut, the venerable but gossipy New York literary scene is twisted into a claustrophobic fun house of paranoia, horror, and wickedly dark humor. George March’s latest novel is a smash. No one is prouder than Mrs. March, his doting wife. But one morning, the shopkeeper of her favorite patisserie suggests that his protagonist is based on Mrs. March herself. Clutching her ostrich-leather pocketbook, she flees, that one casual remark destroying her belief that she knew everything about her husband - as well as herself.

From Sophia Bannion’s first day on the Storytelling team at HEBE, a luxury skincare/wellness company based in New York’s trendy SoHo neighborhood, it’s clear something is deeply amiss. But Sophia, pushing thirty, has plenty of skeletons in her closet next to the designer knockoffs and doesn’t care. Though she leads an outwardly charmed life, she aches for a deeper meaning to her flat existence—and a cure for her brutal nail-biting habit. She finds it all and more at HEBE, and with Tree Whitestone, HEBE’s charismatic founder and CEO.

Morgan Beale is a pop icon - and hates every second of it. He begins adapting the latest best seller, The Chihuahua in the Blue Prada Bag, into a blockbuster movie just before his celebutante wife starts remodeling their Hollywood home, driving Beale to a hotel. Dodging the paparazzi one morning on his way to Starbucks, he spots his writing partner, Luke, who has been dead for over a decade, and who is staring into a mysterious hole in the ground....

After the death of his fiancee due to medical errors, hospital pharmacist Daniel O'Dwyer escapes to Oak Island, North Carolina. The only things on his mind are fresh sea air, fresh seafood, Fat Tire Amber Ale, and the avoidance of any type of healthcare institution. But fate and jellyfish draw him back, and reluctantly, he agrees to go undercover to combat narcotic drug diversion at nearby Boiling Grove Community Hospital.

It’s the summer of 2013 and 21-year-old Ruby, a counselor at Camp Burntshore, can’t wait to supervise a rowdy cabin of 11-year-olds, smoke weed by the fire, and argue about which city make the best bagels. But when Brent, the camp owner’s son, hires Israeli soldiers to deal with a staffing shortfall, Ruby, a committed anti-Zionist, must decide if she’s willing to jeopardize her place at Burntshore to fight Brent over the contentious issues of Jewish belonging and settler colonialism, even as she finds herself falling in love with one of the soldiers, the sweetly handsome Etai.

In a perfect world where everyone destroys everything and eats human flesh, one zombie has had enough: Buck Burger. When he rebels at the natural disorder, his marriage starts deteriorating and a doctor prescribes him an anti-depressant. Buck meets a beautiful green-haired pharmacist fairy named Fairy_26 and quickly becomes a pawn in a cold war between zombies and supernatural creatures.

Cette histoire commence un mardi soir de février sur Facebook, se poursuit dans des inbox et des messages textes. Elle parle de scénarios inventés, de faire l’amour pas très bien dans une chambre sans rideaux, de soirées entre amis à regarder son cell aux deux mi­­nutes, de s’oublier soi-même. D’amour? Ça, Jolen elle-même ne sait pas.

A member of the landed gentry, with a seemingly guaranteed income from his estate in the country, Oblomov lives in Petersburg, uninterested in the business that provides his living and barely aware that the revenue is diminishing. Not that he leads a dissolute life of extravagance, balls and entertainment. Instead he is a dreamer, a sybarite, content above all to spend most of the day supine, in bed. The novel opens with Oblomov thus ensconced, attended only by his dirty, grumbling, indolent servant Zahar, who has looked after him since childhood, catering to his every need.

Bill, (Lord) Rowcester was well and truly in the gumbo. With the benefit of hindsight he could see that setting himself up as a Silver Ring bookie might not have been his smartest move ever. Particularly when being down on his dibbs threatens his oncoming nuptials with the sterling Jill Wyvern. Lucky for Bill he had the land-lease of Jeeves.

Set in a garden in Tehran in the early 1940s, where three families live under the tyranny of a paranoid patriarch, My Uncle Napoleon is a rich, comic and brilliantly on-target send-up of Iranian society. The novel is, at its core, a love story. But the young narrator's delicate and pure love for his cousin Layli is constantly jeopardized by an unforgettable cast of family members and the hilarious mayhem of their intrigues and machinations. It is also a social satire, a lampooning of the widespread Iranian belief that foreigners are responsible for events that occurs in Iran.

Perhaps the most autobiographical (and deliberately least disciplined) of Vonnegut's novels, Slapstick (1976) is in the form of a broken family odyssey and is surely a demonstration of its eponymous title. The story centers on brother and sister twins, children of Wilbur Swain, who are in sympathetic and (possibly) telepathic communication and who represent Vonnegut's relationship with his own sister who died young of cancer almost two decades before the book's publication.

Everyone - even Augustus the cat - has cause to be obliged to Jeeves when he manages to retrieve the infamous Book - the book which lays bare the private lives of three-quarters of the upper classes. And which could prove to be political dynamite at the Market Snodsbury by-election.

They’re here. They’ve arrived. And they’re all eyes. The Voltarian scouting party - illegal aliens extraordinaire - on a top-secret expedition led by one Jettero Heller, Royal Officer of the Fleet. His mission: rescue the planet from pollution - and make it safe for the upcoming invasion. His problem: The planet may not want to be saved - and the invasion may just be a trick.

Would you pay to watch babies fight to the death? Only the wealthy and privileged have the kind of money that can pay for such vile entertainment. The first rule of Baby Fights is there are no rules. Babies can't follow rules. But with a certain persuasion they turn into rabid little monsters, and oh what a spectacle it is to see.

Newly reissued for the modern listener, Martin Amis’s Success is “a terrifying, painfully funny, Swiftian exercise in moral disgust” (The Observer). Foster brothers Terence Service and Gregory Riding could not be more different from one another—Terry “a quivering condom of neurosis and...

When a Republican party wins the general election, they strip the royal family of everything and send them to live on a housing estate in the Midlands. Exchanging caviar for boiled eggs, servants for a social worker named Trish, the queen and her family learn what it means to be poor among the great unwashed. Is their breeding sufficient to allow them to rise above their changed circumstance, or deep down are they really just like everyone else?

In Boogers Are My Beat, Dave gives us the real scoop on: The scientific search for the world's funniest joke; RV camping in the Wal-Mart parking lot; outwitting "smart" kitchen appliances and service contracts; elections in Florida ("You can't spell Florida without 'duh'"); the Olympics, where people from all over the world come together to accuse each other of cheating; and much, much more.

The Roman poet Juvenal was the greatest satirist of Imperial Rome. His 16 satires encompass attacks on the immorality, abuses and hypocrisy of the Romans of his day. The last of the great Roman poets, he wrote between CE 110 and 130, his approach to satire coming close to modern expectations of the genre.

From Senator Al Franken - #1 bestselling author and beloved SNL alum -- comes the story of an award-winning comedian who decided to run for office and then discovered why award-winning comedians tend not to do that. "Flips the classic born-in-a-shack rise to political office tale on its head. I...

If laughter is the best medicine, then this book is your prescription. Turn off the news and spend a few days not following current events. Instead, return to the basics - humanity's ability to laugh at itself. Maybe you should even do a news cleanse for a few days! Hide under the covers and listen to these stories instead. Or listen to a chapter a day, or a story a day for 101 days. This book contains the antidote to whatever is troubling you. They will definitely put you in a good mood.