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.

They’re here. They’ve arrived. And they’re all eyes. The Voltarian scouting party - illegal aliens extraordinaire - on a top-secret expedition led by one Jettero Heller, Royal Officer of the Fleet. His mission: rescue the planet from pollution - and make it safe for the upcoming invasion. His problem: The planet may not want to be saved - and the invasion may just be a trick.

Clive Hapgood is feeling stuck. The private school he teaches at is consuming his life, no thanks to wretched headteacher Julian Crouch. The gentle country life Clive envisaged has stifled him and left his marriage on the brink. What he needs is a holiday - something to remind him and Helen what life used to be like. But when things don't go to plan, and an incident at school begins to weigh heavy on his head, Clive's life starts to unravel in front of him. Has he got it in him to turn things around, whatever the cost? After all, it's his own time he's wasting....

Following the success of his New York Times bestseller Dumpty, award-winning actor, author, and illustrator John Lithgow presents a brand-new collection of satirical poems chronicling the despotic age of Donald Trump. Trumpty Dumpty Wanted a Crown is darker and more hard-hitting than ever...

‘A gutsy, heartfelt novel’ Sunday Times ‘[Shriver’s] best novel yet’ Independent on Sunday ‘A surprising sledgehammer of a novel’ The Times ‘Shriver is brilliant on the novel shock that is hunger… glorious, fearless, almost fanatically hard-working prose’ Guardian ‘Lionel...

The sequel to the bestselling and highly acclaimed The House of God Years after the events of The House of God, the Fat Man has been given leadership over a new Future of Medicine Clinic at what is now only Man's 4th Best Hospital, and has persuaded Dr. Roy Basch and some of his intern cohorts...

The centre of the world: 1990s Manhattan. Victor Ward, a model with perfect abs and all the right friends, is seen and photographed everywhere, even in places he hasn’t been and with people he doesn’t know. On the eve of opening the trendiest nightclub in New York history, he’s living with one beautiful model and having an affair with another. Now it’s time to move to the next stage. But the future he gets is not the one he had in mind.

Brought to you by Penguin. A wickedly clever satire uses comic inversions to offer telling insights into the nature of man and society, the Penguin Classics edition of Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels is edited with an introduction and notes by Robert Demaria, Jr. Gulliver's Travels describes...

Never meddle with unidentified spying objects...The year is: The Future. Mars and Earth are like that divorced couple who don’t exactly like each other but have at least stopped fighting in public. Floating somewhere in between them, amid all the garbage and Gene Roddenberry’s ashes, a transport vessel called the SS Jefferson is homeward bound. Its crew might have even made it on time for once, too...

Audio is a unique medium. It invites listeners to become a part of the process, to interpret what they hear, however they'd like; whereas motion pictures leave no such room for input. With the completion of this book, it dawned on me that, as an actor by trade, I could play the part; and I'm knee-deep in actor pals - why not record the book like a radio play? So that's exactly what happened. I rounded up an excellent troupe of thespians, from both Los Angeles and my home state of Oregon, and we recorded what was to become this epic listen for you to hear!

After several years as a vampire, starting a business, founding his own clan, and proposing to his girlfriend, Fred is finally beginning to settle into life as an undead accountant. Unfortunately, not everyone is happy about his continued survival, or the dangerous friends he's made along the way. The Blood Council has dispatched a representative to determine if Fred is fit for the position he currently fills as head of a clan, and the stakes for failure are deathly serious. Worse, Fred will have to muddle through without the help of Krystal, who is off on a mysterious task of her own.

Maria, Niall and Celia have grown up in the shadow of their famous parents. Their father is a flamboyant singer and their mother is a talented dancer. Now pursuing their own creative dreams, all three siblings feel an undeniable bond, but it is Maria and Niall who share the secret of their parents' pasts.

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.

As time runs down for the players trapped by the evil Lich-Lord in the hyper-realistic MMORPG Fantasy Realms Online, Kromgorn the Barbarian is still stuck playing as the gorgeous, pleasure-fueled Lacey the Courtesan, a character designed to level fastest when she’s getting busy with every NPC in sight. The action is hot, the stakes are high, and Lacey will need to pull out every skill she can muster if she wants to win the day.

Evelyn and Muriel Axon, mother and daughter, lead a haunted existence. Objects of horror to their neighbours, they evade or terrorise any social worker who crosses their path. Inside their house, they pursue a covert persecution of each other, shrinking from the unseen occupants of their spare room. But change is in the air… Every Day is Mother's Day is a merciless comedy of colliding lives: of sex, death, madness, adultery and the social services.

A penguin is all that stands between one man and murder by the mafia Sit back and enjoy this darkly comic full-cast adaptation of Andrey Kurkov’s bestselling novel set in mid-90s Ukraine, plus a bonus interview with the author. Viktor Alekseyevich Zolotaryov is an aspiring writer in Ukraine...

Susy Branch (Tavi Gevinson) and Nick Lansing (Adam DiMarco) aren’t into each other, but they share a similar problem. Susy is a down-on-her-luck socialite who doesn’t want to get a real job, and Nick is a struggling writer who’s tired of tutoring the kids of the one percent. All of their wealthier friends are getting married, to seemingly lucrative results. So, Susy and Nick devise a plan: have a wedding.

A hilarious and moving story of one girl’s fight for freedom of expression, as well as a linguistic tour de force sure to delight word lovers everywhere 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...

A wealthy and depressed man (thanks to the economy, he's not quite rich enough to expand his cache of paintings by Vincent Van Guy, the famed Dutch realist) bound for Christmas in the tropics is abruptly summoned home to North Dakota to visit an ailing aunt. He arrives just in time to be trapped there by a blizzard. The electricity goes out, and when it does, figures from his childhood appear, and historical figures too, for a festive candlelit holiday.

Frank and his team have their work cut out for them. The club needs new guests, drinks, trophies, and employees, not to mention a good mopping of blood after every shift. Guests love him, but the bounty hunters aren't pleased at all with Frank's success. Hector, their leader, knows just what it takes to knock his former friend down a peg or two. Just when Frank thinks things can't get any crazier, he gets invited to a bizarre nightclub owner meeting. New alliances will have to be forged, and dangerous waters will threaten to swallow him.