Showing titles in Satire

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.

Archie Forsythe has two weeks left in the South Bay beach house his father gifted him—before demanding it back as part of a very messy divorce settlement. The plan? Stall the paperwork, stay under the radar, and figure out how to finally launch his surfwear brand without Dad’s money, approval, or interference. The problem? Piper Quinn. His ex-step-sister. Current pain in his...neck. And—thanks to a surprise legal twist—the house's new co-occupant.

My name is Holly Hyman. I love order and prime numbers - and I’m in trouble. The company I work for is pivoting, and not in a way I like. Our new management? Alex Chortsky, a gorgeous, scruffy Russian devil. Our new direction? VR entertainment of the spicy kind. Maybe I wouldn’t mind it so much if my life’s work wasn’t meant for children. Or if I hadn’t accidentally hooked up with a VR version of my wickedly handsome boss. The only way to save my dream project is to make a Faustian bargain. For one night, I pretend to be Alex Chortsky’s girlfriend.

I’ve rebuilt my father’s media company with hard work and determination, but my single status leaves me on the outs with the one businessman I need to get close to. A little white lie and I’m suddenly in love, head over heels. Now I need to find a fake girlfriend, someone to keep up appearances without any emotions. When I find my mother’s fiery assistant in a compromising position, it’s the perfect opportunity to get what I want: a girlfriend for business appearances, without any feelings involved. I won’t let the fact that I’m wildly attracted to the petite redhead get in my way.

All across Britain, a generation of grown-up children are graduating from university, moving back in to their old bedrooms and showing their gratitude by berating their parents for their out-of-date politics. But for proud and high-profile left-wingers Emma and Eddie Hughes, the return of their only child is a far greater challenge than they ever could have anticipated. Young Dylan had warned them there was something personal he needed to tell them, but nothing could have prepared his right-on parents for the shocking revelation he delivers. Their son is a Conservative.

Eat your heart out, Nostradamus! There's a new soothsayer in town and his name is Scott Adams. The ruthless ridiculer of corporate idiocy, together with Dilbert, Dogbert, and the twits in management, turns his eagle eye on everything from new work-avoiding technology to sex with aliens. He predicts that (finally!) we'll learn to harness the most abundant resource in the universe: stupidity.

Northanger Abbey, a satire of Gothic melodrama, is one of Jane Austen's most popular works. When Catherine Morland is launched into the politics and pitfalls of the Bath social season, she behaves with the cheerful open-mindedness of one of Jane Austen's most eligible classic heroines.

What if everything we believed about morality, crime, health, and machines was reversed? In Erewhon, Samuel Butler delivers a brilliant satirical utopia where illness is treated as a crime, criminals are pitied like the sick, and machines are feared as dangerous competitors to mankind’s future. Originally published in 1872, this classic dystopian novel was far ahead of its time—questioning Victorian values, blind progress, and the foundations of civilization itself.

The setting is a comedy club in a small Israeli town. An audience that has come expecting an evening of amusement instead sees a comedian falling apart onstage - an act of disintegration, a man crumbling, as a matter of choice, before their eyes. They could get up and leave or boo and whistle and drive him from the stage, if they were not so drawn to glimpse his personal hell.

Set in a garden in Tehran in the early 1940s, where three families live under the tyranny of a paranoid patriarch, My Uncle Napoleon is a rich, comic and brilliantly on-target send-up of Iranian society. The novel is, at its core, a love story. But the young narrator's delicate and pure love for his cousin Layli is constantly jeopardized by an unforgettable cast of family members and the hilarious mayhem of their intrigues and machinations. It is also a social satire, a lampooning of the widespread Iranian belief that foreigners are responsible for events that occurs in Iran.

Artie Kipps is destined at the tender age of fourteen for a life of drudgery in the drapery trade … until he unexpectedly inherits a fortune from a grandfather he never knew existed! Enter: A whisky-drinking actor and playwright who persuades Kipps to invest in his play! A down-on-their-luck mother and daughter who promptly see Kipps as a means to escape their (comparative) poverty! Plenty of patronizing, unthinking social snobs!

According to Kurt Vonnegut's alter ego, the old science fiction writer Kilgore Trout, a global timequake will occur on February 13, 2001, at 2:27 p.m. It will be the moment when the universe suffers a crisis of conscience: Should it go on expanding indefinitely or collapse and make another great big BANG? For its own cosmic reasons, it decides to back up a decade to 1991, giving the world a 10-year case of deja vu, making everybody and everything do exactly what they'd done during the past decade.

How to Dodge a Cannonball is funnier than the Civil War should ever be. It follows Anders, a teenage idealist who enlists and reenlists to shape the American Future—as soon as he figures out what that is, who it includes, and why everyone wants him to die for it. Escaping his violently insane mother is a bonus. Anders finds honor as a proud Union flag twirler—until he’s captured. Then he tries life as a diehard Confederate—until fate asks him to die hard for the Confederacy at Gettysburg. Barely alive, Anders limps into a Black Union regiment in a stolen uniform.

In "The Robot Who Looked Like Me," a busy man and a busy woman find a way to carve out time to romance each other—by having look-alike robots made to do the job—who then run away together.

Paperback Hell takes a wry look at well-known genres riding high in the publishing charts and mercilessly lampoons them to hilarious effect. Featuring choice chapters culled from titles that bear a striking resemblance to something you've read before, it's the book show that seems determined to destroy the good name of literature.

Ella Minnow Pea is a girl living happily on the fictional island of Nollop off the coast of South Carolina. Nollop was named after Nevin Nollop, author of the immortal phrase containing all the letters of the alphabet: “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.” Now Ella finds herself acting to save her friends, family, and fellow citizens from the encroaching totalitarianism of the island’s Council, which has banned the use of certain letters of the alphabet as they fall from a memorial statue of Nevin Nollop.

À la ferme du Manoir, c'est la révolution : les animaux ont pris le pouvoir. Désormais, ils ne travailleront que pour eux-mêmes, et bâtiront ensemble un avenir radieux. Désormais, ils ne connaîtront plus de maître, car tous les animaux sont égaux. Ou, du moins, presque tous... Cette nouvelle traduction restitue toute la verve satirique d'une fable politique magistrale. Tristement intemporelle et terriblement drôle, La Ferme des animaux n'a pas fini de faire réfléchir les Hommes. Traduction Clotilde Meyer

When Adeline Bertrand-Verdon, the haughty, conniving president of the Proust Association, is murdered, Inspector Jean-Pierre Foucheroux is called on to lead the investigation. Soon Inspector Foucheroux is overwhelmed by a seemingly endless list of suspects: from her assistant to her colleagues, her fiancé to her lover, almost everyone Adeline knew had motive to kill her.

For a time, Jimmy spent his expat days in Mexico unearthing pre-Columbian artifacts. Now he makes a living doing small trucking jobs and helping out with the occasional missing-person situation. But Jimmy’s laid-back lifestyle is being seriously imposed upon by a ninety-pound stalker named Louise. Add to this a sudden wave of hippies led by a murderous ex-con guru in search of psychic happenings, archaeologists unearthing (illegally) the Mayan tombs, and Louise and her weirdo husband’s quest for UFO sites, and Jimmy’s south-of-the-border existence is in danger.

This classic comedy is set in the charming country home of Charles Condomine, a remarried widower. A witty and convivial evening party among friends is transformed when a seance conjures the ghost of Elvira, Charles' first wife, who delights in wreaking havoc among the living. An enchanting Coward comedy!