Satire Comedy

Writing brilliantly and profoundly about class, sex, love, loss, work, despair, and war, Saunders cuts to the core of the contemporary experience. These stories take on the big questions and explore the fault lines of our own morality, delving into the questions of what makes us good and what makes us human.

Audio is a unique medium. It invites listeners to become a part of the process, to interpret what they hear, however they'd like; whereas motion pictures leave no such room for input. With the completion of this book, it dawned on me that, as an actor by trade, I could play the part; and I'm knee-deep in actor pals - why not record the book like a radio play? So that's exactly what happened. I rounded up an excellent troupe of thespians, from both Los Angeles and my home state of Oregon, and we recorded what was to become this epic listen for you to hear!

'I LOVED IT.' Phoebe MacLeod, Author of An (Un)Romantic Comedy '…unexpected twists & turns, which made it all the more captivating.' An Amazon Reader Not every love story follows the script. When Eleanor’s crumbling ancestral estate becomes the setting for a Pride & Prejudice TV adaptation, romance is the last thing on her to-do list. Between managing a sinking fortune, wrangling ranting producers and dodging rampaging cows, Eleanor’s hands are more than full. Enter four very different men vying for her attention – an actor with a dangerous reputation, a quiet missionary on vacation...

In Scoop, surreptitiously dubbed "a newspaper adventure", Waugh flays Fleet Street and the social pastimes of its war correspondants as he tells how William Boot became the star of British super-journalism and how, leaving part of his shirt in the claws of the lovely Katchen, he returned from Ishmaelia to London as the "Daily's Beast's" more accoladed overseas reporter.

Martha Andersson may be 79 years old and live in a retirement home, but that doesn't mean she's ready to stop enjoying life. So when the new management of Diamond House starts cutting corners to save money, Martha and her four closest friends - The Genius, The Rake, Christina, and Anna-Gretta (aka the League of Pensioners) - won't stand for it. Fed up with early bedtimes and overcooked veggies, this group of feisty seniors sets about to regain their independence, improve their lot, and stand up for seniors everywhere.

Behold the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster (FSM), today’s fastest growing carbohydrate-based religion. According to church founder Bobby Henderson, the universe and all life within it were created by a mystical and divine being: the Flying Spaghetti Monster. What drives the FSM's devout followers, a.k.a. Pastafarians? Some say it’s the assuring touch from the FSM’s “noodly appendage”. Then there are those who love the worship service, which is conducted in pirate talk and attended by congregants in dashing buccaneer garb.

An underpaid, overworked certified flight instructor cheats death while attempting to teach a cast of incompetent student pilots to fly at a skeezy South Florida flight school; all in the quest to build flight time so he can get a “real job” at an airline. The planes break, the regs break, metal gets bent, students are lost at sea, and a Top Gun wannabe student, who has 400 hours of flight instruction, still hasn’t made his first solo flight.

The new book censor hasn't slept soundly in weeks. By day he combs through manuscripts at a government office, looking for anything that would make a book unfit to publish-allusions to queerness, unapproved religions, any mention of life before the Revolution. By night the characters of literary classics crowd his dreams, and pilfered novels pile up in the house he shares with his wife and daughter. As the siren song of forbidden reading continues to beckon, he descends into a netherworld of resistance fighters, undercover booksellers, and outlaw librarians.

It was dislike at first sight. Now they’re snowed-in at a campsite. *** Bonus Book included for a limited time*** When Pyper shows up to a winter festival half a day early to beat the storm, she learns the event has been put on hold. Now she’s stuck alone in a campsite with a blizzard that’s getting worse with each furious flake. The good news? Someone else beat the storm too, which means Pyper won’t be on her own after all. The bad news? That someone is the ever-grumpy Kenneth Billings, a man she’s secretly nick-named Beamer Boy, Office Grinch, and her new and rising favorite, ...

Two weeks on the road with my boss? Business as usual. Two weeks on the road with my newer, hotter boss that I had a one-night stand with four years ago? A disaster waiting to happen. It was a one-time thing with a man I knew from work. His name was Oliver Black. The rich and handsome manager of the Botsford Plaza Hotel in Las Vegas. Dark hair. Icy blue eyes. A cocky smirk with dimples deep enough to trip on. No one has to know, he said. And no one did know... except maybe the guests trying to sleep in the suite next door. I didn't know he'd eventually get promoted to my department. I ...

Jessamyn St. Germain is meant to be a star. Not an actor who occasionally books yogurt commercials and certainly not a lowly usher at one of Vancouver’s smallest regional theaters. No, she is bound for greatness, and that’s why the part of Maria in the theater’s upcoming production of The Sound of Music is hers. Or it’s going to be.

When a listless office employee (the narrator) meets Tyler Durden, his life begins to take on a strange new dimension. Together they form Fight Club - a secretive underground group sponsoring bloody bare-knuckle boxing matches staged in seedy alleys, vacant warehouses, and dive-bar basements. Fight Club lets ordinary men vent their suppressed rage, and it quickly develops a fanatical following.

Jon Stewart, host of the Emmy and Peabody Award-winning The Daily Show, and his coterie of patriots deliver a hilarious look at American government.

She’s a fashion model who has everything: a boyfriend, a career, a loyal best friend. But when a sudden freeway "accident" leaves her disfigured and incapable of speech, she goes from being the beautiful center of attention to being an invisible monster, so hideous that no one will acknowledge she exists. Enter Brandy Alexander, Queen Supreme, one operation away from becoming a real woman, who will teach her that reinventing yourself means erasing your past and making up something better. And that salvation hides in the last places you’ll ever want to look.

The “best short story writer in English” (Time) is back with a masterful collection that explores ideas of power, ethics, and justice, and cuts to the very heart of what it means to live in community with our fellow humans. With his trademark prose—wickedly funny, unsentimental, and perfectly tuned—Saunders continues to challenge and surprise: here is a collection of prismatic, deeply resonant stories that encompass joy and despair, oppression and revolution, bizarre fantasy and brutal reality.

This program is read by the author. Blythe Roberson’s sharp observational humor is met by her openhearted willingness to revel in the ugliest warts and shimmering highs of choosing to live our lives amongst other humans. She collects her crushes like ill-cared-for pets, skewers her own suspect decisions, and assures listeners that any date you can mess up, she can top tenfold. And really, was that date even a date in the first place?

As national spokesman for the Motel 6 chain, as a commentator on National Public Radio's All Things Considered, and as creator of the nationally syndicated radio program The End of the Road, Tom Bodett has a voice familiar to millions. Now you can listen, at your pleasure, to his stories about likable, genuine, slightly wacky people who live in the little Alaska town at the end of the road.

It's Easter in Reading, a bad time for eggs, and no one can remember the last sunny day. Ovoid D-class nursery celebrity Humpty Stuyvesant Van Dumpty III, minor baronet, ex-convict, and former millionaire philanthropist, is found shattered to death beneath a wall in a shabby area of town. All the evidence points to his ex-wife, who has conveniently shot herself.

Vainqueur Knightsbane is your average dragon: A giant, fire-breathing lizard who loves to take naps on his golden hoard, kidnap princesses for fun, and make the life of adventurers miserable. Vainqueur's only pleasure in life is to watch his treasure get bigger, one coin at a time. So when a would-be thief turned unwilling minion tells him about "classes", "levels", and "quests", Vainqueur wonders if maybe, just maybe, he should consider a career change. After all, why bother hunting monsters for free when you can get paid for it?

Academy Award winner Dustin Hoffman gives an understated and exemplary performance of this satiric look at the unreality of American media culture. Chance, the enigmatic gardener, becomes Chauncey Gardiner after getting hit by a limo belonging to a Wall Street tycoon. The whirlwind that follows brings Chance to his new status of political policy advisor and possible vice presidential candidate. His garden-variety political responses, inspired by television, become heralded as visionary, and he is soon a media icon.