Showing results by publisher "Blackstone Audio, Inc." in Comedy & Humour

Finding himself in a complicated and sensitive dilemma, Police Commissioner Eddy D'Esopo summons Inspector Flynn to an extravagant country house hidden deep in the woods, cleverly disguised as a hunting and fishing lodge and aptly named the Rod and Gun Club. Unfortunately, Flynn hasn't been called up for a weekend of leisure, he's there to solve the mystery surrounding the death of a young and promising congressman.

Jane Austen's first major novel, a parody of the popular literature of the time, is an ironic tale of the romantic folly of men and women in pursuit of love, marriage, and money. The humorous adventures of young Catherine as she encounters "the difficulties and dangers of a six weeks' residence in Bath" lead to some of Austen's most brilliant social satire.

It’s seven years after the events of Sideways. Miles has written a novel that has been made into a wildly successful movie, and the movie has changed his life. Jack, contrarily, is divorced, has a kid, and is on the skids. Phyllis, Miles’ mom, has suffered a stroke that’s left her wheelchair-bound and wasting away in assisted living. She desperately wants to live with her sister in Wisconsin. When Miles gets invited to be master of ceremonies at the International Pinot Festival in Oregon, he hatches a harebrained road trip.

When Fletch learns there are four ex-cons on the loose in his part of the county, little does he suspect that one of the scruffy and very dangerous men will claim to be the son he never knew - a son about whom he was never even told, in fact. But when a muddy and bedraggled young man accosts him in his study, it doesn't take our wily reporter and investigator long to surmise this kid might well be his son. When Fletch meets the kid's compatriots, he wonders how either of them is going to get out of this situation unscathed.

Severely lacking in sleep from a recent bout of marathon investigative work, all Flynn wants is a proper night's rest. Unfortunately, at the early morning summons of his frantic daughter, he's off to the cemetery to rescue her young friend who's in quite a peculiar bind. And as the day progresses, a curious collection of puzzling cases fall into Flynn's lap, each one stranger and more urgent than the last. Buried secrets and dark motives come to light as he races to solve each crime and bring these seemingly disconnected matters to a full and complete case closed.

It's the score of a lifetime: easy access to a lavish New York City apartment, hordes of valuables, and an absentee owner avoiding the lawyers of his unhappy ex-wives. But before they pull the job, Dortmunder's crew is startled to find their beloved gin joint, the OJ, in the clutches of the Mafia--who consider it perfect for a little fraud, courtesy of a nice big fire. For tactical and highly superstitious reasons, the fate of the OJ is even more important to the crew than the enormous score.

A foundling of mysterious parentage, Tom Jones is brought up by the benevolent and wealthy Squire Allworthy as his own son. Tom falls in love with the beautiful and unattainable Sophia Western, a neighbor’s daughter, whose marriage has already been arranged. When Tom’s sexual misadventures around the countryside get him banished, he sets out to make his fortune and find his true identity.

Gerard sits, fully clothed, in his empty bathtub and pines for Benna. Neighbors in the same apartment building, they share a wall, and Gerard listens for the sound of her toilet flushing. Gerard loves Benna. And then Benna loves Gerard. She listens to him play piano, she teaches poetry, and sings at nightclubs. As their relationship ebbs and flows, through reality and imagination, Lorrie Moore paints a captivating, innovative portrait of men and women in love and not in love.

Junior Bender is a Los Angeles burglar with a magic touch. Since he first started breaking into houses at age fourteen, he's never once been caught. But now, after twenty-two years building an exemplary career, Junior has been blackmailed by Trey Annunziato, one of the most powerful crime bosses in LA, into acting as a private investigator on the set of Trey's porn venture, which someone keeps sabotaging.

Actress Cornelia Otis Skinner and journalist Emily Kimbrough offer a lighthearted, hilarious memoir of their European tour in the 1920s, when they were fresh out of college from Bryn Mawr.

When you take the most absurd parts of history, science, economics, and geography, you end up with a pretty confusing picture of humanity. Why do we have borders? What's the furthest you can get from the ocean? And why did Vikings wear those silly helmets? These are just a few of the strange questions that bounce around the head of Joseph Pisenti. In his YouTube channel, Pisenti presents illogical truths in a logical manner. Here, he builds on this nonsensical humor of the universe with in-depth analysis of empires, economies, and ecosystems as he helps answer the ridiculous.

Says Charles Pooter, "I fail to see - because I do not happen to be a 'somebody' - why my diary should not be interesting." Surprisingly, Mr. Pooter's life is fascinating! The fascination is two-fold: firstly, his astounding arrogance that we should care about his domestic trivia and narcissistic scribblings. Secondly, we can all sympathize with (and wince at!) this ridiculous slave to convention.

Richard Lazar is advancing in years but regressing in life. After a career as a literary novelist that has ground to a halt and landed him in a trailer in Phoenix, Richard is surprised to find sudden success publishing a gritty memoir about his service in Vietnam. Sent on a book tour by his publishing house, Richard encounters his biggest (and really only) fan: an awkward, despondent student named Vance with issues of his own - an absentee father, a depressive mother, his own acute shyness.

Junior Bender is back to untangle one of the weirdest mysteries in Tinseltown. LA burglar Junior Bender has, unfortunately, developed a reputation as a competent private investigator for crooks. The unfortunate part about this is that, regardless of whether he solves the crime or not, someone dangerous is going to be unhappy with him - either his suspect or his employer. Now Junior is being bullied into proving aging music-industry mogul Vinnie DiGaudio is innocent of the murder of a nasty tabloid journalist he'd threatened to kill a couple times.

Someone is looking to wreck the nation's economy, and they're spending plenty to do it. With every lead going nowhere, Flynn's most dizzying logic is put to the test.

Now is not the time to start that fitness program! Instead, laugh along with humorist Dave Barry as he debunks, demotivates, and delights on the subject of fitness. Hear his inimitable views on exercise ("the best time would be the first thing after Easter, but not the one coming up"), weights ("big-time lifters have turned into 400-pound hairy sweaty shapeless grunting masses of tissue. And the men are even worse"), and much more.

Stoned out of his skull - this is how we find washed-up New York magazine writer Digby Maxwell when he is offered a last chance to redeem himself by becoming editor of a small philosophy magazine headquartered in a rural Vermont college town. Digby’s assignment is to make the magazine relevant to contemporary culture. For starters, that requires several more tokes, very deep tokes.

The setting is Seattle's Lake City neighborhood during the 2001 holiday season. In the wake of the 9/11 tragedy and at the peak of Seattle's first wave of tech-boom gentrification - a wave that never quite made it to his neighborhood - Lane Bueche schemes how to win back his wife (and her trust fund). In his childhood bedroom in his mother's decrepit old house, the idealistic but self-serving striver Lane licks his wounds and hatches a plot.

A neurotic young graduate student looking for distraction from her doomed thesis is inexplicably swept off her feet by a narcissistic philosophy professor. The obsession continues even after he has dumped her for someone even needier and she has given up on school and become a television writer. Meeting again in New York, they begin an adulterous affair that, of course, can only end in some kind of crisis.

O. Henry wove several stories together into this highly episodic narrative, taking his title and inspiration from Lewis Carroll's ballad of the walrus and the carpenter in Through the Looking-Glass. The stories are set in the fictional country of Anchuria in Central America, a banana republic where larceny is rampant and revolution lurking in every impoverished back alley. O. Henry offers a cutting satire of contemporary politics and prejudices.