Showing results by publisher "Audible studios" in Satire

Eliot Rosewater, a drunk volunteer fireman and president of the fabulously rich Rosewater Foundation, is about to attempt a noble experiment with human nature, with a little help from writer Kilgore Trout. The result is Kurt Vonnegut's funniest satire, an etched-in-acid portrayal of the greed, hypocrisy, and follies of the flesh we are all heir to.

Deadeye Dick is Kurt Vonnegut's funny, chillingly satirical look at the death of innocence. Amid a true Vonnegutian host of horrors - a double murder, a fatal dose of radioactivity, a decapitation, an annihilation of a city by a neutron bomb - Rudy Waltz, aka Deadeye Dick, takes us along on a zany search for absolution and happiness. Here is a tale of crime and punishment that makes us rethink what we believe...and who we say we are.

Bill, (Lord) Rowcester was well and truly in the gumbo. With the benefit of hindsight he could see that setting himself up as a Silver Ring bookie might not have been his smartest move ever. Particularly when being down on his dibbs threatens his oncoming nuptials with the sterling Jill Wyvern. Lucky for Bill he had the land-lease of Jeeves.

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.

In 1902, a radical vegetarian and nudist from Nuremberg named August Engelhardt set sail for what was then called the Bismarck Archipelago. His destination: the island Kabakon. His goal: to found a colony based on worship of the sun and coconuts. His malnourished body was found on the beach on Kabakon in 1919; he was 43 years old. Christian Kracht's Imperium uses the outlandish details of Engelhardt's life to craft a fable about the allure of extremism and its fundamental foolishness.

Bryson Wilde, investigator for hire, lives in an edgy world where the dames are dangerous, cigarettes dangle from ruby-red lips, and the nights are hotter than whiskey-soaked jazz. In R. J. Jagger’s riveting noir thriller, A Way with Murder, Wilde finds himself entangled in two deadly assignments, one for a young, raven-haired attorney on the run after visiting an archeological site in Mexico, and the other for a pretty, little doll-face, who is too mysterious to trust and too hypnotic to resist.

Crypt currency is the future. The enchantments are reliable. The aethernet infrastructure is sound. And despite the fact the currency is stored in something called a pocket crypt, relies on phantoms of the dead, and often involves a worrying green glow, experts agree it has nothing to do with necromancy. All of the big crypt magnates say so.

In a perfect world where everyone destroys everything and eats human flesh, one zombie has had enough: Buck Burger. When he rebels at the natural disorder, his marriage starts deteriorating and a doctor prescribes him an anti-depressant. Buck meets a beautiful green-haired pharmacist fairy named Fairy_26 and quickly becomes a pawn in a cold war between zombies and supernatural creatures.

Written to be sold under the pseudonym of "Mark Harvey", this 20,000-word novella was never published in Vonnegut’s lifetime. Basic Training is a bitter, profoundly disenchanted story that satirizes the military, authoritarianism, gender relationships, parenthood, and most of the assumed mid-century myths of the family. Haley Brandon, the adolescent protagonist, comes to the farm of his relative, the old crazy who insists upon being called The General, to learn to be a straight-shooting American....

You said you'd listen to your favorite narrators read anything: Well, this ambrosial new audiobook brings together an acclaimed cast of narrators to read aloud the menus of some of our favorite local restaurants here at Audible headquarters in Newark, New Jersey, as only they know how. You haven't truly lived, or dined, until you've heard Cassandra Campbell capture the emotional nuances of Newark's best Indian-inflected burgers or let Nick Podehl extol the virtues of the pear arugula salad and then seductively steer you toward a plate of creamy mushroom linguini.

Inception meets Black Mirror for the YouTube generation. The idea behind MindCast is simple. We insert a small chip into your skull and then every thought, every feeling, every memory is streamed live, 24 hours a day. Trust me - within a few months you'll be the most talked about person on the planet. When David Callow is offered the lead role in a revolutionary new online show, he snatches the opportunity. Rapidly becoming a viral sensation, David is propelled to stratospheric levels of celebrity. However, he soon realises the downside of sharing every secret with the world....

Academy Award winner Dustin Hoffman gives an understated and exemplary performance of this satiric look at the unreality of American media culture. Chance, the enigmatic gardener, becomes Chauncey Gardiner after getting hit by a limo belonging to a Wall Street tycoon. The whirlwind that follows brings Chance to his new status of political policy advisor and possible vice presidential candidate. His garden-variety political responses, inspired by television, become heralded as visionary, and he is soon a media icon.

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.

Hailed in his lifetime as one of Latin America’s greatest writers, Machado de Assis (1839-1908) was a storyteller known for his wholly innovative narrative techniques and uncanny talent for unraveling the social and political milieu of nineteenth-century Brazil. These signature traits are on full display in Quincas Borba, a novel that sees Machado satirize a rapidly changing Rio de Janeiro. Originally published in 1891, the story begins with the death of its titular character, a mad philosopher infamous for spouting pessimistic theories of “Humanitism”.

Inez Victor knows that the major casualty of the political life is memory. But the people around Inez have made careers out of losing track. Her senator husband wants to forget the failure of his last bid for the presidency. Her husband's handler would like the press to forget that Inez's father is a murderer. And, in 1975, the year in which much of this bitterly funny novel is set, America is doing its best to lose track of its one-time client, the lethally hemorrhaging republic of South Vietnam.

When headhunter Fabrice Valantine faces a smoking ban at work, he decides to undertake a course of hypnotherapy to rid himself of the habit. At first the treatment works, but his stress levels begin to rise when he is passed over for an important promotion and he finds himself lighting up again - but with none of his previous enjoyment. Then he discovers something terrible: he accidentally causes a man's death, and needing a cigarette to calm his nerves, he enjoys it more than any other previous smoke.

Boy Genius is a powerful identity satire, the picaresque odyssey of a child seeking to avenge the wrongs perpetrated on his parents. Park's genius, born into the turmoil of post-war Korea, is used as a puppet by the South Korean government - before being banished to America. From a remote New York city ghetto, the boy wages a clandestine guerilla war against all symbols of authority.

La historia se inicia cuando, en el aniversario del gobierno, se atenta contra la vida de Viviana, presidente de la República de Faguas, líder y fundadora del Partido de Izquierda Erótica. Gioconda Belli, poeta y narradora nicaragüense, usa de su humor, ironía, valentía, imaginación, para relatar una historia en la que el realismo de la situación de América Latina y, particularmente América Central, es descrito con una precisión fotográfica. Es poesía en acción, ideología nueva y sueños, no exenta de amor, violencia y esperanza.

Called “our finest black-humorist” by The Atlantic Monthly, Kurt Vonnegut was one of the most influential writers of the 20th century. Now his first and last works come together for the first time in print, in a collection aptly titled after his famous phrase, We Are What We Pretend To Be.

Lucas will nichts als seine Ruhe in einer Welt, die ihn einfach nicht in Ruhe lässt. Eine Kurzgeschichte vom internationalen Bestsellerautor Fredrik Backman Videospiele, Wein und Pad Thai – das ist der perfekte Abend für Lucas. Andere Menschen? Muss nicht sein. Warum denn, wenn er auch alleine glücklich sein kann? Als der dreiköpfige Vorstand der Bewohnervertretung überraschend an seiner Tür klingelt und eine Inspektion seiner Bratpfanne verlangt, ist Lucas alles andere als begeistert. Doch Abwimmeln ist nicht.