Life Satire

It's 1973, and David Leveraux has landed his dream job as a Flavorist-in-Training, working in the secretive industry where chemists create the flavors for everything from the cherry in your can of soda to the butter on your popcorn. While testing a new artificial sweetener - Sweetness #9 - he notices unusual side-effects in the laboratory rats and monkeys: anxiety, obesity, mutism, and a generalized dissatisfaction with life. David tries to blow the whistle, but he swallows it instead.

The seat of the Trelawney family for over 700 years, Trelawney Castle was once the jewel of the Cornish coast. Each successive Earl spent with abandon, turning the house and grounds into a sprawling, extravagant palimpsest of wings, turrets, and follies. But as the centuries passed the Earls of Trelawney, their ambition dulled by generations of pampered living, failed to develop other skills.

Eight years have passed and in 2016 many things have changed for the eccentric Trelawney family. In the months leading up to the Brexit referendum, Ayesha, the beautiful, young secret daughter of the late Enyon Trelawney, has married the much older thuggish banker Tomlinson Sleet with whom she has a young daughter, Stella. Ayesha is busy restoring the once broken-down Trelawney Castle in Cornwall, which Sleet has bought, to its former glory, as well as studying art at the Courtauld in London.

'Have you met them yet, the new couple?' When Gav and Lou move into the house next door, Sara spends days plucking up courage to say hello. The neighbours are glamorous, chaotic and just a little eccentric. They make the rest of Sara's street seem dull by comparison. When the hand of friendship is extended, Sara is delighted and flattered. Incredibly, Gav and Lou seem to see something in Sara and Neil that they admire, too.

First published in 1873, The Gilded Age is both a biting satire and a revealing portrait of post-Civil War America - an age of corruption when crooked land speculators, ruthless bankers, and dishonest politicians voraciously took advantage of the nation's peacetime optimism. With his characteristic wit and perception, Mark Twain and his collaborator, Charles Dudley Warner, attack the greed, lust, and naiveté of their own time in a work that endures as a valuable social document and one of America's most important satirical novels.

After his mother, a theologian and best-selling author, dies in a fiery explosion,49-year-old Calvin Bledsoe's heretofore uninspired life is upended. A stranger shows up at the funeral, claiming to be Calvin's aunt Beatrice, and insists that Calvin accompany her on a trip to Europe, immediately. As he and Beatrice traverse the continent, it quickly becomes apparent that his aunt's clandestine behavior is leading him into danger.

The Big Jewish Book for Jews brings together Jewish wit, inspiring tales, classic skills, and even pickle recipes, for the instruction and edification of the modern Jew. Readers will learn how to sacrifice a lamb unto the Lord, the rules of Canasta, how to build a pyramid (the Bernie Madoff and the Egyptian kind), and how not to accept the first table you are shown to in a restaurant.

Before Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert, Trevor Noah, and Doonesbury, there was Art Buchwald. For more than fifty years, from 1949 to 2006, Art Buchwald’s Pulitzer Prize-winning column of political satire and biting wit made him one of the most widely read American humorists and a popular player in the Washington world of Ethel and Ted Kennedy, Ben Bradlee, and Katharine Graham. Dean Acheson, former U.S. Secretary of State, called Buchwald the “greatest satirist in the English language since Pope and Swift.”

After her former band shot to superstardom without her, Claire reluctantly agrees to a gig as a playgroup musician for wealthy infants on New York's Park Avenue. Claire is surprised to discover that she is smitten with her new employers, a welcoming clique of wellness addicts with impossibly shiny hair, who whirl from juice cleanse to overpriced miracle vitamins to spin class with limitless energy.

Professor Godfrey St. Peter is a man in his fifties who has devoted his life to his work, his wife, his garden, and his daughters, and achieved success with all of them. But when St. Peter is called on to move to a new, more comfortable house, something in him rebels. And although at first that rebellion consists of nothing more than mild resistance to his family's wishes, it imperceptibly comes to encompass the entire order of his life.

A few years ago, small-time finance journalist Matthew Prior quit his day job to gamble everything on a quixotic notion: a Web site devoted to financial journalism in the form of blank verse. When his big idea - and his wife's eBay resale business - ends with a whimper (and a garage full of unwanted figurines), they borrow and borrow, whistling past the graveyard of their uncertain dreams.

The new book by the best-selling authors of Plato and a Platypus Walk Into a Bar is a hilarious take on the philosophy, theology, and psychology of mortality and immortality. That is, Death. The authors pry open the coffin lid on this one, looking at the Big D and also its prequel, Life, and its sequel, the Hereafter.

Filled with wit and charm, The Debutante Divorcée stars Sylvie Mortimer, a recently married socialite who is quick to discover that her marriage is far from photo-perfect. Her best friend, Lauren Blount, the chic-est of the Debutante Divorcées, is basking in her freedom, taking solo honeymoons, having divorce showers, and pursuing any man she chooses as part of her “Make-Out Challenge.”

Mack McAllister has a $600 million idea. His mindfulness app, TakeOff, is already the hottest thing in tech, and he's about to launch a new and improved version that promises to bring investors running and may turn his brainchild into a $1 billion business. Katya Pasternack is hungry for a scoop that will drive traffic. An ambitious journalist at a gossipy tech blog, Katya knows that she needs more than another PR-friendly puff piece to make her the go-to byline for industry news.

In Lionel Shriver's entertaining send-up of today's cult of exercise - which not only encourages better health, but now like all religions also seems to promise meaning, social superiority, and eternal life - an aging husband's sudden obsession with extreme sport makes him unbearable.

Trois destins parallèles s'entrecroisent, trois vies dont le seul point commun est le manque d'amour : Marie, une jeune Californienne d'une beauté rare, Caroline, une Parisienne trentenaire, enfin Marcus Marcus, le salaud, le mégalo, le parano. Construit par séquences, dans une écriture et sur un rythme qui varient selon les personnages, cette "comédie humaine" dresse de manière drôle, critique et profondément attachante, un portrait captivant de nos contemporains.

When Andrei Kaplan’s older brother, Dima, insists that Andrei return to Moscow to care for their ailing grandmother, Andrei must take stock of his life in New York. His girlfriend has stopped returning his text messages. His dissertation adviser is dubious about his job prospects. It’s the summer of 2008, and his bank account is running dangerously low. Perhaps a few months in Moscow are just what he needs. So Andrei sublets his room in Brooklyn and moves into the apartment that Stalin himself had given his grandmother, a woman who has outlived her husband and most of her friends.

Kate and Scott’s marriage has always been a lot of fun, with alcohol at the heart of it. After all, what’s more entertaining than a good laugh and a large drink…or six? But recently, those relaxing drinks have become more crutch than comfort - and the couple have almost forgotten how to talk to each other sober. Then their teenage daughter Holly uploads a video of their humiliating drunken escapades, which gets picked up by YouTube superstar PinkyPud - and goes horrifyingly viral.

Our Woman refuses to be sunk by what life is about to serve her. She's just caught her son Jimmy in the barn with another man. She's been accosted by Red the Twit, who claims to have done the unmentionable with her husband. And now her son's gone and joined the only group that will have him: an army division on its way to Afghanistan.

Tietam Brown tells the story and speaks in the voice—at once innocent and too knowing for his age—of Antietam (Andy) Brown, named for the great-great-great- grandfather who died on that Civil War battlefield. Andy at seventeen is himself the veteran of a violent boyhood, having been locked up in the Northern Virginia Juvenile Detention Center for killing a teenager who attempted to rape him. Now, after seven years, he is out, free, at a crossroads, trying to make a fresh start.