Satire Comedy

Understanding the urgent need for a deeply thoughtful, balanced book to explain our national political process, Dave Barry has not even come close. Though he himself has covered many campaigns, run for president several times, and run for cover at the rainy inauguration of George W. Bush (the man will spare nothing for his art), Barry has instead outdone himself.

My Man Jeeves is a collection of short stories by P. G. Wodehouse, first published in the United Kingdom in May 1919. Of the eight stories in the collection, half feature the popular characters Jeeves and Bertie Wooster, while the others concern Reggie Pepper, an early prototype for Bertie Wooster.

Kara Everglades has just finished her first year of high school and is longing for an adventure. So far, her only option is an invitation from some upperclassmen to watch them race a bunch of bullfrogs in a ditch. Her grandfather, Cornelius Everglades, is a family legend (and a loose cannon), who founded his own island micronation. Unfortunately, the rest of the world refuses to acknowledge it. When Cornelius shows up at Kara’s door needing her help and promising an adventure, Kara agrees to go along with his far-fetched plan.

Damian Stockwell was raised from birth to be a force for good. Trained to combat the evils of the world and blessed with the physique of a demigod, he travels the globe on a quest to confront evil and punch it in the face. At his disposal is a vast fortune, an endless array of gadgets, and an army of loyal allies. The year is 1937. A mysterious curse has possessed Stockwell's friend, and nothing will stop him from dishing out justice one fist at a time. From the bowels of the darkest jungle to the armpit of the Statue of Liberty, there is no place that evil can hide from Damian Stockwell.

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.

Don't Jump chronicles a woman's quest to find her place and purpose amidst sex, drugs, rock 'n' roll and celebrity. It's a story of unfulfilled potential, addiction, and bad behavior. Ultimately, it's a story of redemption, told with levity and a wicked sense of fun. Don't Jump takes us backstage and off-screen with a world famous athlete, rockers, movie stars, and some of the biggest names in comedy. A searing and wickedly funny female perspective, it's an inside view from an outsider.

Disillusioned with the celebrity world, Rosie Richardson escapes to run a refugee camp in the African jungle. When famine strikes and a massive refugee influx heads for the camp, governments and agencies drag their heels. Bringing her former media savvy to the fore, realizing the only way to get food out fast is to bring celebrities first, Rosie turns to the life and man she fled to organize a star-studded emergency appeal from famine-racked Africa.

In a country torn between left and right, two politicians are about to make history. How? By working together! In a nutshell, that’s the premise of this book. House Divided is a political satire, but it’s really a political fantasy, because it takes two opposing candidates, who wouldn’t normally be caught dead together, and challenges them to spend a weekend in the remote Oregon desert - hiking together, camping together, even getting wasted together!

It’s two decades in the future, and a Christian college student named Ace Hartwick has just destroyed his neighbor’s so-called “wife”—actually a sexbot named Sally—in a trash compactor. Soon, Ace will be on trial for murder. Unfortunately for Ace, everyone despises his kind of “radical” Christianity, and, in the fragile America of the future, all the juries are fixed.

For a time, Jimmy spent his expat days in Mexico unearthing pre-Columbian artifacts. Now he makes a living doing small trucking jobs and helping out with the occasional missing-person situation. But Jimmy’s laid-back lifestyle is being seriously imposed upon by a ninety-pound stalker named Louise. Add to this a sudden wave of hippies led by a murderous ex-con guru in search of psychic happenings, archaeologists unearthing (illegally) the Mayan tombs, and Louise and her weirdo husband’s quest for UFO sites, and Jimmy’s south-of-the-border existence is in danger.

Blending fact and fiction, China Dream is an unflinching satire of totalitarianism. Ma Daode, a corrupt and lecherous party official, is feeling pleased with himself. He has an impressive office, three properties, and multiple mistresses who text him day and night. After decades of loyal service, he has been appointed director of the China Dream Bureau, charged with replacing people's private dreams with President Xi Jinping's great China Dream of national rejuvenation.

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.

Susan Frobisher and Julie Wickham are turning 60. They live in a small Dorset town and have been friends since school. On the surface Susan has it all - a lovely house and a long marriage to accountant Barry. Life has not been so kind to Julie, but now, with several failed businesses and bad relationships behind her, she has found stability: living in a council flat and working in an old people's home.

Comic, ironic, grotesque, disturbingly poetic in its use of language, and profoundly sorrowful, Chevengur—here published in a new English translation based on the most authoritative Russian text—is the most ambitious of the extraordinary novels that the great Andrey Platonov wrote in the 1920s and 1930s

Amid the cactus wilds some two hundred miles from Hollywood lies a privileged oasis called Desert D'Or. It is a place for starlets and would-be starlets, directors, studio execs, and the well-groomed lowlifes who cater to them. And, as imagined by Norman Mailer in this blistering classic of 1950s Hollywood, Desert D'Or is a moral proving ground, where men and women discover what they really want - and how far they are willing to go to get it.

Up the Down Staircase is the funny and touching story of a committed, idealistic teacher whose clash with school bureaucracy is a timeless lesson for students, teachers, parents – anyone concerned about public education. Bel Kaufman lets her characters speak for themselves through memos, letters, directives from the principal, comments by students, notes between teachers, and papers from desk drawers and wastebaskets, evoking a vivid picture of teachers fighting the good fight against all that stands in the way of good teaching.

Outraged over the mounting Social Security debt, Cassandra Devine, a charismatic 29-year-old blogger and member of Generation Whatever, incites massive cultural warfare when she politely suggests that Baby Boomers be given government incentives to kill themselves by age 75. Her modest proposal...

The much-loved Guardian columnist asks what it takes to make a husband, and looks to his own married life to provide the answer. Anything resembling advice should be taken at listener's own risk. You'll never get divorced if you never get married. Not even your granny minds if you live in sin anymore. And if you're single you can choose curtains without somebody else butting in. So why bother with marriage? It can't just be an easy way round having to buy your own deodorant.

Oreo is raised by her maternal grandparents in Philadelphia. Her black mother tours with a theatrical troupe, and her Jewish deadbeat dad disappeared when she was an infant, leaving behind a mysterious note that triggers her quest to find him. What ensues is a playful, modernized parody of the classical odyssey of Theseus with a feminist twist, immersed in seventies pop culture, and mixing standard English, black vernacular, and Yiddish with wisecracking aplomb.

When Dinah Brooke's second novel, Lord Jim at Home, was first published in 1973, it was described as "squalid and startling," "nastily horrific," and a "monstrous parody" of upper-middle class English life. It is the story of Giles Trenchard, who grows up isolated in an atmosphere of privilege and hidden violence; who goes to war, and returns; and then, one day—like the hero of Joseph Conrad's classic Lord Jim—commits an act that calls his past, his character, his whole world into question.