Showing titles in Satire

Up the Down Staircase is the funny and touching story of a committed, idealistic teacher whose clash with school bureaucracy is a timeless lesson for students, teachers, parents – anyone concerned about public education. Bel Kaufman lets her characters speak for themselves through memos, letters, directives from the principal, comments by students, notes between teachers, and papers from desk drawers and wastebaskets, evoking a vivid picture of teachers fighting the good fight against all that stands in the way of good teaching.

In sports, everybody loves redemption stories, the underdog who no one believes in but through sheer hard work wins it all. But no one tells the stories of the players who work hard and don’t make it. In pro football, 53 guys get on the roster. Ten make it to the practice squad. And then there’s the 64th Man - that’s Billy Logan (Cena), who seems to always be one spot from glory.

Father Sebastian Urrutia Lacroix is dying. A priest, a member of Opus Dei, a literary critic and a poet, in his feverish delirium the crucial events of his past swell around him. From glimpses of the great poet Pablo Neruda, the German writer Ernst Junger and his one-time student, General Pinochet, to nightmarish flashes of falcons and falconers, the Chilean landscape and faces of those now dead, reality and imagination crowd and clamber in pursuit of the 'wizened youth' who still haunts Father Lacroix all these years later.

Simultaneously novel, memoir, commonplace book, confession and critique, It is the story of every man and woman cursed with too much consciousness and too little comprehension. Above all though, it is the story of Jen Fain, a journalist negotiating the fraught landscape of contemporary urban America. Party guests, taxi drivers, brownstone dwellers, professors, journalists, presidents and debutantes fill these dispatches from the world as Jen finds it.

Alice's journey begins as all good journeys do: hitting on the sales guy at REI. After a tumultuous breakup, a quick career transition, family upheaval, and a sobriety journey that didn't fix her life quite as much as she expected it to, Alice decides that the only way to solve all her problems is to hike the Pacific Crest Trail. But as she begins preparing for the months-long quest, she realizes the answers she's seeking might not be on top of a snow-covered mountain. Especially since she just learned there was snow in California.

Tiller is an average American college student with a good heart but minimal aspirations. Pong Lou is a larger-than-life, wildly creative Chinese American entrepreneur who sees something intriguing in Tiller beyond his bored exterior and takes him under his wing. When Pong brings him along on a boisterous trip across Asia, Tiller is catapulted from ordinary young man to talented protégé, and pulled into a series of ever more extreme and eye-opening experiences that transform his view of the world, of Pong, and of himself.

Anthony Trollope's series of witty, gently satirical stories of provincial life are set in the fictional town of Barchester and the surrounding county of Barsetshire. With a focus on the lives, loves and tribulations of the local clergy and rural gentry, the canvas is broad and colourful, with a set of iconic characters in whose lives we become intimately involved as they grow up, grow old, and fall in or out of love and friendship across the years.

When Dinah Brooke's second novel, Lord Jim at Home, was first published in 1973, it was described as "squalid and startling," "nastily horrific," and a "monstrous parody" of upper-middle class English life. It is the story of Giles Trenchard, who grows up isolated in an atmosphere of privilege and hidden violence; who goes to war, and returns; and then, one day—like the hero of Joseph Conrad's classic Lord Jim—commits an act that calls his past, his character, his whole world into question.

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.

The daughter of a narcissistic film star and a billionaire, Madison is abandoned at her Swiss boarding school over Christmas, while her parents are off touting their new projects and adopting more orphans. She dies over the holiday of a mari­juana overdose - and the next thing she knows, she’s in Hell.

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.

One of the best-loved of Nabokov's novels, Pnin features his funniest and most heart-rending character. Professor Timofey Pnin is a haplessly disoriented Russian emigre precariously employed on an American college campus in the 1950s. Pnin struggles to maintain his dignity through a series of comic and sad misunderstandings, all the while falling victim both to subtle academic conspiracies and to the manipulations of a deliberately unreliable narrator.

Mike has teamed up with director Eric Martin to adapt the novelization into a fully immersive cinematic audio experience, and an epic all-star cast has come together to introduce Stinker to a whole new generation of fans! It's Smokey and the Bandit meets Every Which Way But Loose meets Smokey and the Bandit Parts 2 and 3. Feel the thrill as Stinker teams up with old pals Boner and Jumbo, plus new friends Buck and Rascal the Chimp, for a crazy ride across the highways and byways of Bicentennial America.

A classic guide to tricks and tactics for winning arguments, with commentary on the use of and defense against each tactic. The best summary of this audiobook is "being right doesn’t mean you’re gonna win, and this is why". It’s the ultimate guide to spotting the many different kinds of bull people pull in order to win over the crowd, rather than argue the point at hand. There’s very few of them that don’t immediately bring examples to mind, and having it laid out clearly like this is the perfect armour to stop people derailing you.

Travel with Steve, doomed for eternity to serve as hell’s Mr. Fixit, on a wild ride through the circles of hell in this best-selling, humorous fantasy series.

Galapagos takes the listener back one million years to A.D. 1986. A simple vacation cruise suddenly becomes an evolutionary journey. Thanks to an apocalypse, a small group of survivors stranded on the Galapagos Islands are about to become the progenitors of a brave, new, totally different human race. Kurt Vonnegut, America's master satirist, looks at our world and shows us all that is sadly, madly awry - and all that is worth saving.

My name is Kitty Collins and I’m a serial killer. I don’t want to kill. It’s just so hard to resist. Some men really, really deserve it. Men like Blaze Bundy, an anonymous influencer spreading misogyny online. He’s making it very hard for me to control my murderous urges. Meanwhile I’m in the South of France to watch my mother getting marry a man I’ve never met. I should be drinking cocktails and focusing on my tan, not plotting a murder. But a woman’s work is never done.

The irreverent author of the cult classic Syrup hits his target in this satire on the wages of big capital. In Max Barry's hilarious vision of the near future, the world is run by giant American corporations, and employees take the last names of the companies they work for; The Police and The NRA are publicly traded security firms, and the U.S. government may only investigate crimes if they can bill a citizen directly.

Author and comedian Daniel Foxx presents a wonderful collection of stories especially for the little darlings of the fabulously wealthy - that can also be enjoyed by YOU, the downtrodden, pitiful, ordinary adult! Listen to the everyday adventures of Rupert, Shallotte and Genevievette as they ski, holiday, and drift around Selfridges - whilst always keeping a healthy distance from the dreaded hoi polloi!

JIMMY “JIMBO” DOYLE, is a trailer-trash Floridian, on the road to obscurity. His politically incorrect comments and sexual escapades make him one of the most reckless protagonists of our morally and ethically-twisted times. Desperate and broke, he devises a plan to rent rooms in repossessed mobile-homes to the nation’s unwanted registered sex offenders. Despite his bi-polar, serial marrying mother’s every attempt to sabotage his success, Jimbo’s brainchild sparks an industry that makes him one of the richest and most hated men in America.