Showing results by publisher "HighBridge, a division of Recorded Books" in Comedy & Humor

Ray Morris is a tech journalist with a forgettable face, a tiresome manner, a small but dedicated group of friends, and a wife, Garthene, who is pregnant. He is a man who has never been punched above the neck. He has never committed adultery with his actual body. He has never been caught up in a riot, nor arrested, nor tagged by the state, nor become an international hate-figure. Not until the summer of 2011, when discontent is rising on the streets and within his marriage. Ray has noticed none of this. Not yet.

Diane Williams, "godmother of flash fiction" (The Paris Review), returns with thirty-three brilliant short stories. In Williams's stories, life is newly alive and dangerous; whether she is writing about an affair, a request for money, an afternoon in a garden, or the simple act of carrying a cake from one room to the next, she offers us beautiful and unsettling new ways of seeing everyday life.

A compendium of quotes and riffs by P.J. O'Rourke on subjects ranging from government to fishing to apps, to be published on what would have been his seventy-fifth birthday.

In the novel Who's Who When Everyone Is Someone Else, the character "C. D. Rose" searches an unnamed middle-European city for the long-lost manuscript of a little-known writer named Maxim Guyavitch. That search was fruitless, but in The Blind Accordionist, "C. D. Rose" has found the manuscript—nine sparkling, fable-like short stories—and he presents them here with an (hilarious) introduction explaining the discovery, and an afterword providing (hilarious) critical commentary on the stories, and what they might reveal about the mysterious Guyavitch.

Evoking such classics as Elmer Gantry and The Day of the Locust, William Giraldi's About Face boldly transfers the perennial literary themes of celebrity, ambition, and obsession to twenty-first-century Boston. There we meet Val Face, a charismatic self-help guru who captivates multitudes with his uncanny ability to heal adherents using only the power of his words, the mysterious touch of his hands, and the transcendent beauty of his face.

Alexandra Petri's US History contains a lost (invented!) history of America. (A history for people disappointed that the only president whose weird sex letters we have is Warren G. Harding.) Petri's "historical fan fiction" draws on real events and completely absurd fabrications to create a laugh-out-loud, irreverent takedown of our nation's complicated past. A witty, absurdist satire of the last 500 years, Alexandra Petri's US History is the fake textbook you never knew you needed.

On a sunny day in a business park near Portland, Oregon, forty-two-year-old web developer Kevin Maloney is in the throes of an existential crisis that finds him shoeless in a field of Queen Anne's lace, reflecting on the tumultuous events that brought him to this moment. Growing up in the suburbs, young Kevin suffered "a psychological break that ripped me from my humdrum existence" mainlining high fructose corn syrup and episodes of The Golden Girls.