Showing titles in Satire

Dana Potowski is a restaurant critic and food writer and a longtime member of a progressive Unitarian Universalist congregation in Southern California. Just as she’s finishing the book tour for her latest bestseller, Dana is asked to join the church search committee for a new minister. Under pressure to find her next book idea, she agrees, and resolves to secretly pen a memoir, with recipes, about the experience. That memoir, Search, follows the travails of the committee and their candidates—and becomes its own media sensation.

Would you like a Bible from the Devil's perspective? What about Satan's side of the story? Would you like to live blasphemously? Then these secrets are for you.

Linus Owen is a young professor of conspiracy theory at a small college just outside San Francisco. His marriage is foundering and his wife, Claudia, has gone to Chicago to visit her mother. But if Claudia is in Chicago, how is it that two FBI agents show up at Linus' office and inform him that Claudia has been killed in a plane crash on her way from New York to Brazil? And why did a man named Jeffrey Holden, the vice president of a major pharmaceutical company, buy her ticket and die beside her?

The year is 2108, and the North American Commonwealth is bursting at the seams. For welfare rats like Andrew Grayson, there are only two ways out of the crime-ridden and filthy welfare tenements: You can hope to win the lottery and draw a ticket on a colony ship settling off-world...or you can join the service. With the colony lottery a pipe dream, Andrew chooses to enlist in the armed forces for a shot at real food, a retirement bonus, and maybe a ticket off Earth.

Steve is hell's super, its handyman. Being Mr. Fixit to the underworld keeps him and his assistant, Orson Welles (yes, that Orson Welles), pretty busy, since things go on the blink all the time down there. No malfunction has ever created so much inconvenience, though, as the malfunction of hell's escalator, which leads from the pearly gates to the depths of Hades. What's worse: The breakdown appears to be sabotage.

Spanning eras and cultures from ancient Rome to medieval England to 1950s Hollywood, Jennifer Wright's It Ended Badly guides you through the worst of the worst in historically bad breakups. In the throes of heartbreak, Emperor Nero had just about everyone he ever loved - from his old tutor to most of his friends - put to death. Oscar Wilde's lover, whom he went to jail for, abandoned him when faced with being cut off financially from his wealthy family.

Bridget Jones, the iconic character who sold 15 million books worldwide, inspired a major motion picture franchise, and became beloved as a Chardonnay-swilling everywoman, is back in this hotly anticipated third installment.

Bergdorf Blondes are a thing, you know, a New York craze. Absolutely everyone wants to be one, but it’s très difficult. Honestly, it requires a level of commitment comparable to, say, learning Hebrew or quitting cigarettes. But first, a little bit about moi. The gossips call me a champagne bubble of a girl. I’m fluent in French, intermittently. I gave up England for Princeton to my mother’s horror. By day, I write articles for a fashion magazine. By night, I’m on the prowl for the ultimate accessory a Bergdorf Blonde must have: an impossibly rich man with a very large diamond ring.

From his first novel – Less Than Zero – published when he was still a college student – to his most recent – the fierce American Psycho, Bret Easton Ellis has been a powerful and original presence in contemporary literature, whether giving voice to a previously inchoate generation or provoking a controversy that raged throughout the culture. Now he takes a quantum leap forward: an awesome reckoning of the American Century at endgame. In Glamorama, a young man in what is recognizably fashion and celebrity-obsessed Manhattan is gradually, imperceptibly drawn into a shadowy looking-glass of that society, there and in London and Paris, and then finds himself trapped on the other side, in a much darker place where fame and terrorism and family and politics are inextricably linked and sometimes indistinguishable. At once implicated and horror-stricken, his ways of escape blocked at every turn, he ultimately discovers – back on the other, familiar side – that there was no mirror, no escape, no world but this one in which hotels implode and planes fall from the sky.

Perhaps the most autobiographical (and deliberately least disciplined) of Vonnegut's novels, Slapstick (1976) is in the form of a broken family odyssey and is surely a demonstration of its eponymous title. The story centers on brother and sister twins, children of Wilbur Swain, who are in sympathetic and (possibly) telepathic communication and who represent Vonnegut's relationship with his own sister who died young of cancer almost two decades before the book's publication.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a policeman taking a holiday would barely have had time to open his suitcase before he finds his first corpse. Commander Sam Vimes of the Ankh-Morpork City Watch is on holiday in the pleasant and innocent countryside, but not for him a mere body in the wardrobe. There are many, many bodies - and an ancient crime more terrible than murder. He is out of his jurisdiction, out of his depth, out of bacon sandwiches; and out of his mind. But never out of guile. Where there is a crime there must be a punishment.

Two female agents of Operation Cream Cake - double agents and honey traps against the KGB - are murdered. Bond must find the others and conduct them to safety before they meet a similar fate. In a race against time, Bond travels to Ireland and the KGB is soon on the scene. But all is not as it seems and soon Bond finds he needs all his wits to negotiate a labyrinth of double-crossing that is to lead him to a bewildering showdown in a remote corner of the Kowloon province of Hong Kong.

When Ollie Sweet is very publicly dumped by ‘The One’, his seemingly perfect world dissolves into misery, self-pity, and a bizarre rooftop meeting with a suicidal man in flip-flops. While most would seek out the support of loved ones at such a torrid time, natural-born journalist Ollie asks the subscribers of his website: how did they get over their failed relationships? When Ollie follows some of their more extreme advice, chaos inevitably ensues.

Understanding the urgent need for a deeply thoughtful, balanced book to explain our national political process, Dave Barry has not even come close. Though he himself has covered many campaigns, run for president several times, and run for cover at the rainy inauguration of George W. Bush (the man will spare nothing for his art), Barry has instead outdone himself.

Would you want to know what your colleagues say behind your back? Jolene certainly doesn’t. She’s riddled with anxiety, depressed, and hates her coworkers. The less she knows about them, the better. So when a catastrophic IT f--k up grants her access to all of their emails and private messages, she’s initially horrified. The last thing she wants is to be privy to their sad discussions about dying desk plants and marital troubles. That’s until with job cuts looming, she realises the power this new-found knowledge gives her.

I was, in life, to be a gambler, a risk-taker, a swashbuckler, a knight. I accepted, then and there, my place in the world. I was a fighter of windmills. I was a chaser of whales. I was Not Sidney Poitier. Not Sidney Poitier is an amiable young man in an absurd country. The sudden death of his mother orphans him at age eleven, leaving him with an unfortunate name, an uncanny resemblance to the famous actor, and, perhaps more fortunate, a staggering number of shares in the Turner Broadcasting Corporation.

Maren Winter is a world-renowned restaurateur who has built an empire. No one heeds the whispers of her retirement more closely than her three daughters, all in service to their mother’s legacy. On the night of Maren’s annual New Year’s Eve party, a line is crossed, and word of a humiliating family meltdown spreads like a Northern California wildfire through the culinary elite. It’s a golden opportunity for one of them to step into power—and a trigger for a spiraling descent into paranoia and blind ambition.

The Wig, the Bitch & the Meltdown is a satirical look behind the scenes of Model Muse, a fictional reality model competition show and global phenomenon. Seen through the eyes of our moral compass Pablo Michaels - the heart of production in the helter-skelter world of Model Muse - we look behind the scenes and backstage shenanigans of the fashion/reality TV world. As "The Fixer", Pablo is the man everyone turns to in crisis.

Set in the 26th century A.D., Yevgeny Zamyatin's masterpiece describes life under the regimented totalitarian society of OneState, ruled over by the all-powerful "Benefactor." Recognized as the inspiration for George Orwell's 1984, We is the archetype of the modern dystopia, or anti-Utopia: a great prose poem detailing the fate that might befall us all if we surrender our individual selves to some collective dream of technology and fail in the vigilance that is the price of freedom.

Sidi lives a hermetic life as a bee whisperer, tending to his beloved “girls” on the outskirts of the desolate North African village of Nawa. He wakes one morning to find that something has attacked one of his beehives, brutally killing every inhabitant. Heartbroken, he soon learns that a mysterious swarm of vicious hornets committed the mass murder - but where did they come from, and how can he stop them? If he is going to unravel this mystery and save his bees from annihilation, Sidi must venture out into the village and then brave the big city and beyond in search of answers.