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

The funny man is a middling comic in an unnamed city. By day he takes care of his infant son, by night he performs in small clubs, sandwiched between other aspiring comics. His wife waits tables to support the family. It doesn't sound like much, but they're happy, more or less. Until the day he comes up with it. His thing. His gimmick. And everything changes. He's a headliner, and the venues get bigger fast. Pretty soon it's Hollywood and a starring role in a blockbuster, all thanks to the gimmick.

After a near fatal car accident, Casey Maldonado's life is over. So she packs up, puts her house on the market, and leaves town, her only companion Death, who won't take her but won't leave her alone.

Eadie Boone, an artist and former beauty queen, tackles everything with gusto and flair. But tailing her wayward husband is proving to be an exasperating chore. Nita Broadwell, a good Southern girl from a good Southern family, is jolted out of complacency when she discovers condoms in her husband's shirt pocket. Meanwhile, she is slipping into a steamy romance with a hunky handyman 13 years her junior.

Jennifer Worick had a bad day. And then a bad week. She channeled her aggravation into creating the blog “Things I Want to Punch in the Face”, which became a sensation. Although her bad week passed, she has continued to take note of the little irritations that torment us all daily, from old guys with ponytails to 20-minute coffee prep, bizspeak to vanity plates, celebrity baby names to emoticons. Now, just in time for the holiday season, the book showcases more than 100 of Worick’s most punch-worthy aggravations, rated on a scale of 1 to 5 fists.

The critically acclaimed author of American Nerd makes his fiction debut with this romantic tragicomedy about a teenage boy and girl who discover his dad is having an affair with her mom. At 15, Josh Paquette and Khadijah Silverglate-Dunn catch Josh’s father and Khadijah’s mother kissing in a natural foods store. They make a pact never to cheat on anyone, ever. They have no problem keeping the vow—until they meet again at 28, both struggling with career and identity, and both engaged to other people.

Meet smart-aleck Southampton attorney Jackie Swaitkowski. Her business relies on constant movement of Hamptons' real estate market. After making an odd request to evict his sister-in-law from his home, one of her clients turns up dead. Jackie would have expected that to be the end of it, but an envelope found on the corpse contains an item so unusual that she finds herself working on something bigger, and more dangerous, than real estate.

You Know Me, Al is a classic of baseball, the game and the community. Jack Keefe, one of literature's great characters, is talented, brash, and conceited. Self-assured and imperceptive, impervious to both advice and sarcasm, Keefe rises to the heights, but his inability to learn makes for his undoing. Through a series of letters from this bush-league pitcher to his not-quite-anonymous friend Al, Lardner maintains a balance between the funny and the moving, the pathetic and the glorious.

"You're in a slump." Nick Lasseter's boss is talking about his job performance as a reporter for the Waterloo Weekly, but he might as well be talking about Nick's whole life. His current assignment, a profile of a legendary liberal ex-congressman, is in trouble even before the subject abruptly dies.

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.

Jackie Swaitkowski investigates the death of a female pilot who had a family tree filled with ex-cons and a passenger list packed with Hamptons high society. Just before Eugenie Conklin's plane took a nosedive, she tossed out a camera case that held an unusual set of photos. While defending Eugenie's husband during the accident investigation, Jackie realizes that she recognizes more than a few of the faces in those pictures.

Benjamin arrives with his parents for a tour of Roaring Orchards, a therapeutic boarding school tucked away in upstate New York. Suddenly, his parents are gone and Benjamin learns that he is there to stay. Sixteen-years-old, a two-time failed suicide, Benjamin must navigate his way through a new world of “popped privileges”, “candor meetings”, “morning meds”, and “cartoon brunches” - all run by adults who themselves have yet to really come of age.

With this satirical novella, English schoolmaster Edwin A. Abbott provides both a mathematical fantasy and pointed observations on the social hierarchy of Victorian culture. The narrator, “a Square,” resides in the fictional two-dimensional world of Flatland. When he is visited by a sphere, he is suddenly faced with proof of the existence of three dimensions and is forced to see the limitations of his world.

David Wilson is called "Pudd'nhead" by the townspeople, who fail to understand his combination of wisdom and eccentricity. He redeems himself by simultaneously solving a murder mystery and a case of transposed identities.

Topper is a hilarious, ribald comedy about a mild-mannered bank manager and two capricious ghosts, George and Marion Kerby, who make it their mission to rescue Topper from the drab "summer of suburban Sundays" that is his life.

First comes love, then comes marriage, then comes...Yikes! Thicke, the unforgettable dad on Growing Pains and an honorary Father of the Year in real life, provides a guideline for pregnanthood from a man's perspective in this 2000 Audie Award-winning presentation.

They adore her in Manhattan. They worship her in Hollywood. They idolize her in the liberal media. But out in the real world are those of us who see through her lies about her husband, reject her socialist economics, and despise her radical social agenda. We are the members of what Hillary Clinton described as a "Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy", and at VRWC headquarters, we've been keeping a file on her.

In his first published work in prose, James Joyce paints vivid portraits of the people of Dublin, his city of birth, in a collection of stories whose larger purpose, he said, was to depict a "moral history of Ireland". From the first story, in which a young boy encounters death, to the haunting final story involving the middle-aged Gabriel, the book gives an unflinching and realistic portrayal of "dear, dirty Dublin" in the early 20th-century.

When Stuever's narrative begins, he's standing in line with the people waiting to purchase flat-screen TVs at Best Buy on Black Friday, the opening of the Christmas shopping season. From there he follows a number of key residents of Frisco, Texas, as they navigate through the nativity and all its attendant crises.

In Youth in Bondage, the second volume of Nick's journals, we find him stuck in Sheeni's hometown of Ukiah, living like an indentured servant with his penny-pinching father while his paramour and her boyfriend are away at school in Santa Cruz. But trouble finds Nick again when the F.B.I. picks up his trail and he must rely on the cahones of his tough alter ego, Francois Dillinger.

He didn't intend to burn half of Berkeley to the ground or create a media frenzy by faking his best friend's suicide or enroll in high school dressed as an elderly Italian woman. However, he did. Nick Twisp started out an honor student and ended up a fugitive. His ongoing struggles to make sense out of high school, deal with his divorced parents, and lose his virginity have resulted in his transformation from an unassuming, precocious 14-year-old to a modern youth in open revolt.