Showing results by publisher "Dreamscape Media, LLC" in Comedy & Humour

"Ageless" Hollywood diva Jessica Gray is finishing the last leg of her one-woman show in St. Louis, Missouri, and the nearby town of Chouteau Forest is dazzled. During the show, she humiliates three homeless women onstage, fires her entourage - not for the first time - and makes a bitter enemy of the town's powerful patriarch. After she collapses at an after-show party and is rushed to the hospital, she ignores the advice of her doctors and discharges herself in order to return to LA.

Stevie, a recovering alcoholic and kitchen manager of Chappy’s, a small-chain restaurant, is frantically trying to prevent the people around her from going supernova: her PTSD-suffering veteran son, her uproariously demented parents, the polyglot eccentrics who work in her kitchen, the blind geriatric dog she inherits, and a damaged 5-year-old who landed on her doorstep and might just be her granddaughter. In the tight grip of new corporate owners, Stevie battles corporate’s “restructuring” to save her kitchen.

How did we come up with that? Everyone knows about mousetraps, but did you know they were originally inspired by burglar alarms? What was so important to Samuel Hopkins that he became the first person to have a US patent? Many curious creations have been born over the centuries, and author and historian Sophie Stirling dives into the curious minds behind these unique (and sometimes wild) ideas throughout history.

Despite the end of her marriage, Diane still has plenty of love to give. Determined not to waste her days - that’s just not her style - she finds a job in a daycare and solace in cocktails with her best friend, Claudine, who convinces Diane her love life is not over. Diane wants romance and sees no reason why she shouldn’t have it, but she soon discovers, in her typically chaotic and hilarious manner, that the task is not as simple for a woman approaching her 50s as it is for a man.

Lions, Komodo dragons, dogs, monkeys, and pheasants - all have shared spotlights and tabloid headlines with celebrities such as Sharon Stone, Thomas Edison, and David Hasselhoff. In this critically acclaimed collection, Lydia Millet hilariously tweaks these unholy communions to run a stake through the heart of our fascination with famous people and pop culture.

Annie and her devoted but comically incompetent childhood sweetheart, Sam, are the owners and operators of Annie's, a gourmet sandwich shop, home to the legendary Paul Bunyan Special Sandwich - their nutritionally challenged continual source of income and marital harmony and local fame. But into their mostly charmed marriage comes a scary medical diagnosis for Annie - and the overwhelming challenge of finding a way to help Sam go on without her. Annie decides to leave Sam step-by-step instructions for a future without her and considers her own replacement in his heart and their bed.

Told from five points of view, this novel takes place over the three wild days in which these lives intersect.

George Entmen just turned 40, and he can't complain. As the James Lydecker chair of hermeneutics in the English department at Northwestern, he is honored in his field, beloved by friends and family, and ready to drift quietly into tenured middle age. But then he discovers he can fly. Sure, he can only fly very, very slowly - he needs to have his hands thrust out in front of him like Superman - and he only flies three or four inches above the ground. But why does this nonetheless amazing phenomenon drive so many people into a rage?

Number-one New York Times best-selling author Laurie Notaro isn't exactly a domestic goddess - unless that means she fully embraces her genetic hoarding predisposition, sneaks peeks at her husband's daily journal, or has made a list of the people she wants on her Apocalypse Survival team (her husband's not on it). Notaro chronicles her chronic misfortune in the domestic arts, including cooking, cleaning, and putting on Spanx while sweaty (which should technically qualify as an Olympic sport).

One night Don, a father of three, leaves his house for an evening stroll only to wake up the next morning stoned and sleeping in a hammock next to a young woman he barely knows. His wife, Claire, leaves the house on this same night to go on a midnight run - only to find herself bumming cigarettes and beer outside the all-night convenience store. As the summer lingers and the temperature rises, this quotidian town's adults grow wilder and more reckless while their children grow increasingly confused.

Sold-out concerts, screaming fans, TV shows, Number Ones. This is the rock and roll dream, and the Wonderkids are living it. But something's wrong. The gigs are sold out, sure, but the halls are packed with little kids - not sexy hipsters. Edward Lear, the Wonderkids' lead singer, songwriter, and resident mad genius Blake Lear has always written lyrics as silly as they are infectious. Rock and roll has always been for the kids, right?

It’s the end of summer 2003. George W. Bush has recently declared the mission in Iraq accomplished, the unemployment rate is at its highest in years, and Martha Stewart has just been indicted for insider trading. Meanwhile, somewhere in the Midwest, Troy Augustus Loudermilk (fair-haired, statuesque, charismatic) and his companion Harry Rego (definitely none of those things) arrive at America’s most prestigious creative-writing program, to which Loudermilk has recently been accepted for his excellence in poetry. Loudermilk, however, has never written a poem in his life.