Showing titles in Satire

But her life has changed. She now has her doctorate in history. Her workaday hours are spent at St. Elizabeth’s College, mostly squandered in history department shriek-fests. She is also a widow. Her husband Bob died one half-day after triumphantly finishing the New York City Marathon in four hours and twelve minutes. And although 20 years have passed without seeing him, she still cannot get her former lover, Nelson Sharpe of the Nassau County Police Department, out of her system.

Marcy Hammer's life has been turned upside down. Her husband, the head of a global brassiere empire, didn't think twice about leaving her after thirty-three years of marriage for a 32DD lingerie model. Now Harvey the Home-Wrecker is missing in action, but Marcy's through thinking about what a cliché he is. What she needs now is a party-size bag of potato chips, a good support system, and a new dress.

Professional underachiever Dan Foster is finally taking a vacation. Sure, his life has been average at best, and yeah, he’s never quite lived up to his potential. But after a few Miller Lites in paradise with his girlfriend, Mara, things are starting to look up. Then the sun explodes....

Acclaimed author of The Adults Alison Espach’s short story "In-Depth Market Research Interviews with Dead People" is an at-once hilarious and heart-breaking portrait of a dead woman’s marriage and the Volvo that stood in the middle of it all.

In this slyly funny and lavishly inventive novel, Nobel Prize winner V. S. Naipaul traces the unlikely career of Ganesh Ramsumair, a failed schoolteacher and impecunious village masseur who in time becomes a revered mystic, a thriving entrepreneur, and the most beloved politician in Trinidad. Witty, tender, filled with the sights, sounds, and smells of Trinidad's dusty Indian villages, The Mystic Masseur is Naipaul at his most expansive and evocative.

George, Harris, and J. decide to take a cycling trip through the Black Forest - to be accomplished on a tandem plus one. Whether it is Harris's harrowing experience with a Hanoverian road-waterer or George's valiant attempt to buy a cushion for his aunt, their experiences are hilarious - - and they may even offer some important lessons to all who may be contemplating a cycling trip in the U.S.

Linus Owen is a young professor of conspiracy theory at a small college just outside San Francisco. His marriage is foundering and his wife, Claudia, has gone to Chicago to visit her mother. But if Claudia is in Chicago, how is it that two FBI agents show up at Linus' office and inform him that Claudia has been killed in a plane crash on her way from New York to Brazil? And why did a man named Jeffrey Holden, the vice president of a major pharmaceutical company, buy her ticket and die beside her?

Ryan Fleming is a young agnostic reeling from his brother’s death. Though he is deeply angry with God, he makes good on a promise he made to his brother in the final moments of his life: to visit a church at least once. But shortly after his arrival, the slick megachurch’s shoddily installed video projector falls on his head—sending Ryan through a wormhole into another world. To make it back to his own universe, he must partner with a woman named Faith to awaken a long-sleeping King—the World-Maker who can make all things new.

Democratic vice presidential candidate Senator Joseph Lieberman made history when he became the first person of Jewish faith to be included on a major-party ticket. But he wasn't the first one to think of it. Not by a long shot. Long before he ran for office, Al Franken asked the question, Why Not Me? in his comedic audiobook of the same name....

What happens when a Prime Minister suddenly stops being Prime Minister? That's the question facing Henry Tobin—Britain's least popular, shortest-serving post-war PM, who's forced into retirement 30 years early after a bruising election defeat. But he's not going to let failure crush his spirits. Instead, he plans to pick himself up, repair his battered reputation and make his name in some other field—though he's not quite sure what that will be.

As time runs down for the players trapped by the evil Lich-Lord in the hyper-realistic MMORPG Fantasy Realms Online, Kromgorn the Barbarian is still stuck playing as the gorgeous, pleasure-fueled Lacey the Courtesan, a character designed to level fastest when she’s getting busy with every NPC in sight. The action is hot, the stakes are high, and Lacey will need to pull out every skill she can muster if she wants to win the day.

Ground-breaking, satirical and anarchic, The Young Ones introduced alternative comedy to mainstream TV, and made household names of its writers and performers. It ran for two series on BBC Two between 1982 and 1984, winning a host of devoted fans and a BAFTA Award for its second series. Collected here are all the dysfunctional foursome's manic adventures.

Named as one of the New York Times Year’s Ten Best upon its publication, Gary Shteyngart’s Absurdistan is a biting, poignant satire of American-style democracy and the American Dream. After returning to Russia to attend his father’s funeral, 30-year-old Misha is subsequently denied a visa when he attempts to re-enter the United States.

Professor James Lowry didn’t believe in spirits, or witches, or demons. Not until a gentle spring evening when his hat disappeared, and suddenly he couldn’t remember the last four hours of his life. Now, the quiet university town of Atworthy is changing - slightly at first, then faster and more frighteningly each time he tries to remember.

What do we believe? And in God's name why? Lewis Black has the answers. Or at least his answers. He survived Hebrew school and a bar mitzvah (barely), was a 60's college student who saw the parallels between religious rapture and drug-induced visions (even if none of his friends did), explored the self-actualization movement of the 70's (and the self-indulgence it engendered), and turned a cynical eye toward politicians who don the cloak of religious rectitude to cover up their own hypocrisy.

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.

While filming on location in Belfast, Northern Ireland, John Doe, the universally adored host of the culinary travel show Last Call, is found dead in a hotel room in an apparent suicide. As the news of his untimely demise breaks stateside, a group of friends, fixers, hustlers, and opportunists vie to seize control of the narrative: Doe’s chess-master of an agent Nia, ready to call in every favor she is owed to preserve his legacy; down-on-her-luck journalist Katie, who fabricates a story about Doe to save her job at a failing website.

A delivery driver finds himself inside a world occupied by characters from unfinished novels and must accept he is not real. But the world around him doesn’t feel right, and when he starts asking questions, the authorities soon take extreme measures to stop him finding the truth about Fiction Land.

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.

Every Winter, the human population hibernates. Your name is Charlie Worthing, and it's your first season with the Winter Consuls, the committed but mildly unhinged group of misfits who are responsible for ensuring the hibernatory safe passage of the sleeping masses. You are investigating an outbreak of viral dreams which you dismiss as nonsense; nothing more than a quirky artifact borne of the sleeping mind. When the dreams start to kill people, it's unsettling. When you get the dreams, too, it's weird. When they start to come true, you begin to doubt your sanity.