Showing results by publisher "Recorded Books" in Comedy & Humour

Junior Bender, Los Angeles burglar and off-the-books detective to the felonious, is reminded that rock and roll will never die (no matter how fervently he wishes some of it would) when Hollywood’s most dangerous geriatric mobster, Irwin Dressler, retains Junior’s investigative services to solve a rather unharmonious problem. Junior has one weekend to figure out who’s to blame—a weekend that begins with his tires being slashed, threatening notes left on his car, and a theatrical backdrop falling on a drummer during the truly terrible first set of the first concert.

Cecil Younger is a man who takes comfort in the absurdity of the universe, and the universe is obliging him when he gets a call from his lawyer and psychiatrist, who offers him a job. A client wants to hire Younger to kill someone. Though common sense tells him murder just isn't a good career move, his finances tell him it can't hurt to meet his potential client, hoping he can succeed in appeasing him - without a dead body.

Georgia Thackery, adjunct English professor, has a new job teaching at Falstone College of Art and Design, known as FAD to its students and faculty. Living in a borrowed bungalow during winter in the snowiest part of Massachusetts, Georgia feels her isolation weighing as heavily as the weather. Then she receives a package containing her best friend, Sid, a walking, talking skeleton who has lived with the Thackery family since Georgia was six. With Georgia working out of town, Sid was lonely too.

Dad fails are the stuff of legend: The time he pulled up to a drive-through and shouted his order into a trash can, or when he ate a handful of what he thought were nuts but were really discarded olive pits, or that day he used a glue stick instead of ChapStick. In Dad Can You Not?, Leighton brings some real doozies to light.

Verona Montero loves calling herself a private dick because it makes her sound like she’s in a 1940s detective movie. And it means she gets to say “dick” a lot. So when Miami—a walking Barbie doll with an emoji addiction and bikinis smaller than Verona's patience—needs proof her billionaire husband Javier is cheating, Verona's all over it. Especially when it means working with divorce lawyer Quentin, whose cologne gives her what she professionally diagnoses as “crotch headaches.”

“Understated” and “tasteful” could never be applied to Annie, and that’s just fine with her. A colorful actress with a decades-long career in TV, film, and theater—including a recurring role on Seinfeld and a center-stage spot touring with The Moth—Annie offers her trademark unabashed takes on both everyday and typically taboo topics.

Celebrated sports commentator Dan Patrick and comedy writer Joel H. Cohen team up with some of America’s greatest comedy writers to tell you everything and nothing about America’s sport.

Henry Farber, a well-meaning psychiatrist, is forced into hiding when the nation’s chief executive—a narcissistic autocrat in his disastrous second term—is found dead on the consulting room couch. From an isolated bungalow, Farber sets out to clear his name while offering an intimate view of a flawed populist leader.

They say you can’t teach stand-up comedy, but you can certainly give a lot of good advice. In the Recorded Books Original 28 Stand-Ups, the best stand-up comedians in the business share tips of the trade and full-fledged stories to impart the lessons they learned treading the boards, hitting the road, and of course, on occasion, bombing.

For decades Hazie Coogan has tended to the outsized needs of Katherine “Miss Kathie” Kenton, veteran of multiple marriages, career comebacks, and cosmetic surgeries. But danger arrives with gentleman caller Webster Carlton Westward III, who worms his way into Miss Kathie’s heart - and boudoir. Soon, Hazie discovers that this bounder has already written a celebrity memoir foretelling Miss Kathie’s death in an upcoming musical extravaganza. As the body count mounts, Hazie must execute a plan to save Katherine Kenton for her fans and for posterity.

Three years ago, someone brutally killed four people on the scow Mygirl. In a crowded courtroom, Cecil Younger helped the accused go free. Now the man charged with the Mygirl murders has disappeared. As a new father, Cecil just wants to move on from the Mygirl killings, but finds he can't just walk away when more and more people associated with the case end up dead. Younger is certain someone is trying to finish the grisly job begun on the Mygirl. He must discover the truth behind what happened three years ago before he can settle what's happening now.

Criminal defense investigator Cecil Younger spends his days coaching would-be felons on how to avoid incriminating themselves. When Sherrie, a returning client with a good heart but a penchant for bad boys, asks him to track down some evidence that will help with her case, Cecil agrees. Cecil treks out to the shady apartment complex she mentioned, only to find his teenage daughter, Blossom, inside. He manages to get both the box Sherrie wanted and his daughter safely home, and later discovers the "evidence" is a large pile of cash - fifty thousand dollars, to be exact.

Sometimes Bone King cannot go through doors. He has no physical impairment, but at times his brain and muscles simply can't recall how to walk him through them. Perhaps it has something to do with his being distracted thinking about grammar and etymology all the time, or maybe it's anxiety that his wife is having an affair with the yardman. But then renowned neurologist Arthur Limongello offers a diagnosis as peculiar as the ailment: Bone's self is starting to dislodge from his brain.

A novel of seduction and madness, hate and love, set in the world of Argentinean academia and animated by the spirits of Wittgenstein, Rousseau, Nabokov, and Bolano.

Oreo is raised by her maternal grandparents in Philadelphia. Her black mother tours with a theatrical troupe, and her Jewish deadbeat dad disappeared when she was an infant, leaving behind a mysterious note that triggers her quest to find him. What ensues is a playful, modernized parody of the classical odyssey of Theseus with a feminist twist, immersed in seventies pop culture, and mixing standard English, black vernacular, and Yiddish with wisecracking aplomb.

The citizens of Claxton, Texas, are justifiably possessed with a healthy thirst - on the dusty plains of West Texas, they're in the midst of a seven-year drought when the town finally votes to go wet. The opposition faction, and its leader, Miss Jessica Cater, manage to shut down the promotion beer-store owner Buck Turlock has cooked up just in time for the Fourth of July celebration. But will Buck's schemes lead Miss Jessie to rethink her position?

Fifteen-year-old Jacob feels almost on the inside: almost smart, almost funny, almost good-looking, almost worthy of falling in love. His sister is too busy dating guys in Whitesnake jackets to notice, and his best friend is occupied with his own painful pubescent crisis. Jacob's mother has just started a curious (and rather un-Christian) holy war with the church across the street, while his father has secretly moved into the garage.

In The Time Seller, AG and his family live in a smallish apartment with a not-so-smallish debt to the bank. But AG dreams of a different life and steps onto a path of exhilarating uncertainty.

After a series of bizarre events, ironworker Mick Brannigan finds himself knee-deep in laundry - and considering a retreat to his hopelessly littered kitchen. He soon learns important lessons from unlikely sources. W. Dale Cramer, multiple Christy Award-winning author of Bad Ground and Levi's Will, delivers a Romantic Times Top Pick tale of a reluctant Mr. Mom who discovers what matters most.

Sepp Gregory, a reality-TV hunk and one of People magazine's "sexiest men alive", is on tour to promote his debut novel. Not that Sepp's actually read the book - he doesn't have to. He lived it! And everyone just wants him to take his shirt off. The book has hit the best-seller list and is even getting rave reviews from serious critics. Aside from Harriet Post, that is. One of the blogosphere's most respected literary minds, Harriet fears that the novel's reception means the end of civilization is upon us.