Life Satire

It's 1973, and David Leveraux has landed his dream job as a Flavorist-in-Training, working in the secretive industry where chemists create the flavors for everything from the cherry in your can of soda to the butter on your popcorn. While testing a new artificial sweetener - Sweetness #9 - he notices unusual side-effects in the laboratory rats and monkeys: anxiety, obesity, mutism, and a generalized dissatisfaction with life. David tries to blow the whistle, but he swallows it instead.

Like Kofi Annan, Larry Miller is one of the most irresistible comic personalities working today. Known for years as an actor, writer, comedian, and sexual pioneer, he's gained a new following as a cultural commentator and frequent guest on political shows. Now, in Spoiled Rotten America, he fixes his gaze on what's funny about our daily lives; which includes, roughly speaking, everything.

La obra de Francisco Quevedo abarca la mayoría de los géneros prosísticos del siglo XVIII y refleja su visión pesimista de la sociedad española de los Austrias menores. El Buscón, extraordinaria novela picaresca, combina la crítica social con la intención de crear una obra de arte del lenguaje.

Emily Glass knows she’s neurotic. But she’s got it under control. Sort of. She dons compression socks when she flies (because, you know, deep vein thrombosis) and responds to people routinely overestimating her age with more Lifespin classes and less gluten. Thankfully, she also has David, the wonderful man she’ll soon call husband - assuming they can survive wedding week with her wildly dysfunctional family. Emily’s therapist mother, Marla, who’s been diagnosing her children since they were in diapers, sees their homecoming as the perfect opportunity for long-overdue family therapy sessions. Less enthused are Emily and her two siblings.

This short novel follows the fate of Sissy Jupe, a warm-hearted circus child, and the family that adopts her. Deserted by her ailing father, Sissy is taken into the cold household of the Gradgrind family, which operates a school. The "eminently practical" Thomas Gradgrind believes only in facts and figures and has raised his children accordingly, thoroughly suppressing the imaginative side of their nature, and the consequences are devastating.

Perfect for fans of Gillian Flynn and Ruth Ware, "Behind The Stars" is this year's most addictive psychological suspense novel. Don't miss the thriller everyone will be talking about! Tara Alexander's dream comes true when her debut novel soars to the top of the bestseller lists. But her moment in the spotlight quickly turns into a nightmare as a flood of vicious one-star reviews threatens to destroy everything she's worked for. As the attacks intensify and become personal, Tara finds herself trapped in a terrifying web of online harassment. With her career in jeopardy and her sanity ...

Zach Post is an editor for It magazine with an impressive history: his father is a famous architect, his mother a socialite, and he has attended Colgate, Berkley, and Liverpool University. Or, at least that's what everyone thinks. When obnoxious new editor Mark Larkin is quickly promoted, Zach's secrets are threatened, and his future no longer seems bright. But he knows what to do-Mark Larkin must be eliminated.

Our Woman refuses to be sunk by what life is about to serve her. She's just caught her son Jimmy in the barn with another man. She's been accosted by Red the Twit, who claims to have done the unmentionable with her husband. And now her son's gone and joined the only group that will have him: an army division on its way to Afghanistan.

Tietam Brown tells the story and speaks in the voice—at once innocent and too knowing for his age—of Antietam (Andy) Brown, named for the great-great-great- grandfather who died on that Civil War battlefield. Andy at seventeen is himself the veteran of a violent boyhood, having been locked up in the Northern Virginia Juvenile Detention Center for killing a teenager who attempted to rape him. Now, after seven years, he is out, free, at a crossroads, trying to make a fresh start.

Framed by the oil shale bust and the real estate boom, by protests against Reagan and against the Gulf War, The Optimistic Decade takes us into the lives of five unforgettable characters and is a sweeping novel about idealism, love, class, and a piece of land that changes everyone who lives on it. There is Caleb Silver, the beloved founder of the back-to-the-land camp Llamalo, who is determined to teach others to live simply. There are the ranchers, Don and son Donnie, who gave up their land to Caleb, having run out of options after Exxon came and went and left them bankrupt.

Do you have a neighbor or, heaven forbid, friend or family member, who regularly spews utter nonsense in your direction along the lines of their government being out to chip them or that a quack aromatherapy pill like vitamin D might save lives from Covid? Or perhaps you have been accosted by a random conspiracy theorist in the street who adamantly believes that everyone should add horse-dewormer to their morning coffee or that lockdowns aren’t the pinnacle of scientific acumen that they clearly are and that whoever invented them should obviously win a Nobel Prize?

With freshman year behind her, things look grim for Rachael O'Brien's summer back home in Canton, Ohio, where the chances of hooking up with her crush seem to fall between slim and none. As if "quality time" working in her father's restoration shop isn't tortuous enough, his ditzy, age-inappropriate aerobics-instructor girlfriend moves into their house and tries to bond.

Coach Randy is working mightily to keep it together, and not simply with his vaguely unhappy wife, distant child, and a new boss who's eliminating half the sales force. This season's soccer parents are a demanding bunch. Diane's wine-fueled group emails are almost unintelligible; team mom Jacqui's enthusiasm for the league verges on manic; a divorced couple can barely conceal their murderous rage at each other; and another mom is laser-focused on schooling everyone on what constitutes a healthy snack option.

Jack Dee is here to help. Too often today the emphasis in psychotherapy is on providing clients with a metaphorical hug when what they so clearly need is good slap, so Jack Dee took the matter into his own hands, and whilst everyone else was baking bread and clearing out their cupboards during lockdown, he retrained online as a psychotherapist. After an incredibly gruelling four hours of study, he got his certificate of completion from The Ruislip College of Advansed Learning (sic).

Ben Jewell has hit a breaking point. His 10-year-old son, Jonah, has severe autism, and Ben and his wife, Emma, are struggling to cope. When Ben and Emma fake a separation - a strategic decision to further Jonah's case in an upcoming tribunal - Ben and Jonah move in with Georg, Ben's elderly father. In a small house in North London, three generations of men - one who can't talk, two who won't - are thrown together.

Three letters. Two mistakes. One Last chance. When Jennifer Cole is told she has three months to live she decides to write three letters sharing the desires, fears and frustrations she has always kept to herself. And at first she finds that telling the truth makes her feel free and liberated. But three months later, Jennifer's secrets are alive and out in the world...and so is she. As she discovers, sometimes the truth has a way of surprising you....

Siem Sigerius is a beloved, brilliant professor of mathematics with a promising future in politics. His family - including a loving wife, two gorgeous, intelligent stepdaughters, and a successful future son-in-law - and carefully appointed home in the bucolic countryside complete the portrait of a comfortable, morally upright household.

Nine-year-old Meena can't wait to grow up and break free from her parents. But as the daughter of the only Punjabi family in the mining village of Tollington, her struggle for independence is different from most. Meena wants fish fingers and chips, not chapati and dhal; she wants an English Christmas, not the usual interminable Punjabi festivities. But more than anything, she wants to roam the backyards of working-class Tollington with feisty Anita Rutter and her gang.

Poetry speaks for me when I cannot easily or thoroughly articulate what I’m feeling and experiencing. Thus my poetry emerges from “the depths” of me, where symbols, metaphors, and emotions surge and become words. My life journeys include being a psychic counselor, spiritual seeker, abused child, recovering adult, many love relationships gained and lost, an activist, philosopher, astrologer, writer, disabled person who miraculously healed after forty years, mother, grandmother, organic gardener, permaculture farmer, world traveler and senior citizen. My book is divided my book into ...

A young boy comes of age within the confines of post-civil-war Beirut, with conflict and comedy lurking round every corner. Adam dreams of becoming an astronaut, but who has ever heard of an Arab on the moon? He battles with his father, a book-hoarding journalist with a penchant for writing eulogies, his closest friend, Basil, a Druze who is said to worship goats and believe in reincarnation, and a host of other misfits and miscreants in a city attempting recover from years of political and military violence.