Satire Comedy

Since its publication in 1996, George Saunders’ debut collection has grown in esteem from a cherished cult classic to a masterpiece of the form, inspiring an entire generation of writers along the way. In six stories and a novella, Saunders hatches an unforgettable cast of characters, each struggling to survive in an increasingly haywire world.

In the great tradition of the American almanac, The Areas of My Expertise is a brilliant and hilarious compendium of handy reference tables, fascinating trivia, and sage wisdom on all topics large and small. Although best sellers such as Poor Richard's Almanack and The Book of Lists were certainly valuable, they also were largely true.

Eugene Debs Hartke describes an odyssey from college professor to prison inmate to prison warden back again to prisoner in another of Vonnegut's bitter satirical explorations of how and where (and why) the American dream begins to die. Employing his characteristic narrative device - a retrospective diary in which the protagonist retraces his life at its end, a desperate and disconnected series of events here in Hocus Pocus show Vonnegut with his mask off and his rhetorical devices unshielded.

Summer 1977. The Blyton Summer Detective Club (of Blyton Hills, a small mining town in Oregon's Zoinx River Valley) solved their final mystery and unmasked the elusive Sleepy Lake monster - another low-life fortune hunter trying to get his dirty hands on the legendary riches hidden in Deboën Mansion. And he would have gotten away with it, too, if it weren't for those meddling kids.

Après avoir écrit sur le système de santé, la mort et sur la médecine elle-même, le docteur Alain Vadeboncœur a eu envie de relaxer un peu et de partager les moments étranges et cocasses qui ponctuent sa vie à l'urgence. Avec la sensibilité qu'on lui connaît, il raconte les petits travers des gens du métier (et les siens !), les rencontres loufoques, les contrastes étonnants entre certains drames et leurs répercussions insolites... et même comment son préfacier, le comédien et réalisateur Simon Olivier Fecteau, a un jour tenté de le tuer.

When larger-than-life cattle rancher Jordan "Bick" Benedict arrives at the family home of sharp-witted but genteel Virginia socialite Leslie Lynnton to purchase a racehorse, the two are instantly drawn to each other. But for Leslie, falling in love with a Texan was a lot simpler than falling in love with Texas. Upon their arrival at Bick's ranch, Leslie is confronted not only with the oppressive heat and vastness of Texas but also by the disturbing inequity between runaway riches and the poverty and racism suffered by the Mexican workers on the ranch.

It’s been two years since Rose wrote the article that exposed Poppy as a socialite grifter. Normally, one of her articles going viral would be cause for celebration, but the highly publicized trial that followed turned Poppy into the internet’s favorite celebrity. And Rose has been reeling from the aftermath ever since. Although Poppy served her time for defrauding some of the richest, most powerful men in the world, Rose knows this is only the tip of the iceberg for Poppy’s crimes. She just can’t prove it yet … At least not without the help of a devilishly handsome FBI agent gone rogue.

De’Andrea Whitman, her husband Malik, and their five-year-old daughter, Nina, are new to the upper-crust white suburb of Rolling Hills, Virginia—a move motivated by circumstance rather than choice. De’Andrea is heartbroken to leave her comfortable life in the Black oasis of Atlanta, and between her mother-in-law’s Alzheimer's diagnosis, her daughter starting kindergarten, and the overwhelming whiteness of Rolling Hills, she finds herself struggling to adjust to her new community. To ease the transition, her therapist proposes a challenge: make a white girlfriend.

Banal Nightmare is filled with complicated characters who will dazzle you in their rendering just as often as they will infuriate you with their decisions. Halle Butler singularly captures the volatile, angry, aggrieved, surreal and entirely disorienting atmosphere of the modern era.

Spanning eras and cultures from ancient Rome to medieval England to 1950s Hollywood, Jennifer Wright's It Ended Badly guides you through the worst of the worst in historically bad breakups. In the throes of heartbreak, Emperor Nero had just about everyone he ever loved - from his old tutor to most of his friends - put to death. Oscar Wilde's lover, whom he went to jail for, abandoned him when faced with being cut off financially from his wealthy family.

In Lionel Shriver's entertaining send-up of today's cult of exercise - which not only encourages better health, but now like all religions also seems to promise meaning, social superiority, and eternal life - an aging husband's sudden obsession with extreme sport makes him unbearable.

After his wife, Sarah, dies, K. loses his metaphorical capacity, becoming so wedded to the notion of clarity that he infuriates everyone, friends and strangers alike. When he intervenes in an armed robbery, K. finds himself both an inadvertent hero and the star of a new reality television program. Together with Claire, a grocery store clerk with a sharp tongue and a yen for celebrity, he travels the country, ruffling feathers and gaining fame at the intersection of American politics and entertainment.

Publié en 1830, Le Rouge et le Noir de Stendhal est un roman historique et psychologique qui dépeint l’ascension sociale et les ambitions de Julien Sorel, un jeune homme ambitieux issu d'une famille modeste. À travers ses tentatives pour gravir les échelons de la société, il se trouve souvent dans les intrigues au milieu de personnes influentes. Satire mordante de la société française du XIXe siècle, l'œuvre s'attaque aux hypocrisies de l'Église et des aristocraties, tout en constatant la folie des actions du protagoniste.

Après la mort de son père, Michel, fonctionnaire quadragénaire et blasé, décide de partir en Thaïlande pour goûter aux plaisirs exotiques. Il y rencontre Valérie, cadre dans une grande société de voyages, à qui il soufflera sa théorie sur les vraies motivations des Européens en quête de sensations fortes. Embarqué dans la lutte pour le profit à tout prix, où le corps est plus que jamais une marchandise, Michel jette un regard cynique sur la société occidentale.

Willa Marks has spent her whole life choosing hope. She chooses hope over her parents’ paranoid conspiracy theories, over her dead-end job, over the rising ocean levels. And when she meets Sylvia Gill, renowned Harvard professor, she feels she’s found the justification of that hope. Sylvia is the woman-in-black: the only person smart and sharp enough to compel the world to action. But when Sylvia betrays her, Willa fears she has lost hope forever.

One of the greatest satires in American literature, Mark Twain's "A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court" begins when Hank Morgan, a skilled mechanic in a nineteenth-century New England arms factory, is struck on the head during a quarrel and awakens to find himself among the knights and magicians of King Arthur's Camelot. The 'Yankee' vows brashly to "boss the whole country inside of three weeks" and embarks on an ambitious plan to modernize Camelot with 19th c. industrial inventions like electricity and gunfire. It isn't long before all hell breaks loose!

No vuelve con un detective chiflado, sino con nueve. No vuelve con un caso, sino con tres.Vuelve el mejor Eduardo Mendoza. Barcelona, primavera de 2022. Los miembros de una organización gubernamental secreta se enfrentan a la peligrosísima investigación de tres casos que tal vez estén relacionados entre sí, o tal vez no: la aparición de un cuerpo sin vida en un hotel de Las Ramblas, la desaparición de un millonario británico en su yate y las singulares finanzas de Conservas Fernández.

The continuing adventures of the starship A.S.F. Willful Child. Its mission: to seek out strange new worlds on which to plant the Terran flag, to subjugate and if necessary obliterate new life-forms, to boldly blow the... And so we join the not-terribly-bright but exceedingly cock-sure Captain Hadrian Sawback and his motley crew on board the Starship Willful Child for a series of devil-may-care, near-calamitous and downright chaotic adventures through "the infinite vastness of interstellar space."

The auto age is defunct. Buicks, Chryslers, and Pontiacs disfigure the landscape. Vines sprout in Manhattan. Wolves are seen in downtown Cleveland. And psychiatrist, mental hospital outpatient, and inventor Dr. Tom More has created a miraculous instrument: the ontological lapsometer, a kind of stethoscope of the human spirit. With it, he plans to cure mankind’s spiritual flu. But first, he must survive Moira, Lola, and Ellen - and discover why so many living people are actually dead.

Danielle (still she/her) is back, and this time it's professional. Having survived the vocational trauma of Irvine, California, Danielle catapults into the C-Suite as the youngest Chief Diversity Officer in herstory. But with her lofty title comes peril. Expectations, the male gaze, accountability ... The dangers are legion, and the worst of them is Bruce (he/him), the powerful CEO used to taking what he wants. Now Danielle is in the fight of her life. Not just against America's racist meta-culture, but against her deepest, forbidden desires. Can she resist Bruce's charismatic pull?