Satire Comedy

No one knows us quite the same way as the men and women who sit beside us in department meetings and crowd the office refrigerator with their labeled yogurts. Every office is a family of sorts, and the Chicago ad agency Joshua Ferris brilliantly depicts in his debut novel is family at its strangest and best. The characters in Then We Came to an End cope with a business downturn in the time-honored way: through gossip, secret romance, elaborate pranks, and increasingly frequent coffee breaks.

Michael Beard is a Nobel prize-winning physicist whose best work is behind him. Trading on his reputation, he speaks for enormous fees, lends his name to the letterheads of renowned scientific institutions and half-heartedly heads a government-backed initiative tackling global warming. A compulsive womaniser, Beard finds his fifth marriage floundering. But this time it is different: she is having the affair, and he is still in love with her.

Contemptuous of their parents, who pass their days in a stupor of liquor, drugs, and sex, the children feel neglected and suffocated at the same time. When a destructive storm descends on the summer estate, the group's ringleaders - including Eve, who narrates the story - decide to run away, leading the younger ones on a dangerous foray into the apocalyptic chaos outside.

John Hodgman completes his vision with That Is All, the last book in a trilogy of Complete World Knowledge. Like its predecessors, That Is All compiles incredibly handy made-up facts into brief articles, overlong lists, and beguiling narratives on new and familiar themes. It picks up exactly where More Information left off - specifically, at page 596 - and finally completes Complete World Knowledge, just in time for the return of Quetzalcoatl and the end of human history in 2012.

Beyond memoir, this guidebook offers practical advice on everything from "How to Be the Black Friend" to "How to Be the (Next) Black President" to "How to Celebrate Black History Month". This is a humorous, intelligent, and audacious guide that challenges and satirizes the so-called experts, purists, and racists who purport to speak for all Black people. With honest storytelling and biting wit, Baratunde plots a path not just to blackness, but one open to anyone interested in simply "how to be".

After a botched Halloween ritual, Madison Spencer, the snarkiest dead girl in the universe, finds herself trapped in Purgatory, otherwise known as Earth. The upside: She is no longer subject to physical limitations (she can pass through doors and walls). The downside: Well, she’s still dead.

Après avoir écrit sur le système de santé, la mort et sur la médecine elle-même, le docteur Alain Vadeboncœur a eu envie de relaxer un peu et de partager les moments étranges et cocasses qui ponctuent sa vie à l'urgence. Avec la sensibilité qu'on lui connaît, il raconte les petits travers des gens du métier (et les siens !), les rencontres loufoques, les contrastes étonnants entre certains drames et leurs répercussions insolites... et même comment son préfacier, le comédien et réalisateur Simon Olivier Fecteau, a un jour tenté de le tuer.

Zero Gravity is the fifth collection of comic pieces by Woody Allen, a hilarious prose stylist whose enduring appeal has been savored since his classics Getting Even, Without Feathers, Side Effects, and Mere Anarchy. This new work combines pieces that have appeared in The New Yorker along with 11 written exclusively for this book, each a comic inspiration.

Once more, we catch up with the delightful goings-on in the fictitious 44 Scotland Street from Alexander McCall Smith. With customary charm and deftness, Alexander McCall Smith gives us another instalment in this popular series, now running in its eighth season in The Scotsman.

As well as writing about his first love, cars, James has a go at political correctness, the endless rules and regulations of daily life, the internal combustion engine and traffic wardens. He discusses gastropubs, Jeremy Clarkson, and other trials of modern life. His highly entertaining observations from behind the wheel will have you laughing out loud, whether you share his opinions or not.

After too many glasses of champers, Ruby takes her moment in the spotlight to reveal what she really thinks of every one of her friends, family and colleagues. She accuses her husband of having an affair and lambasts her mother for a lifetime of playing her three daughters against each other. As the stunned gathering gawks at Ruby, the birthday girl reveals that she has terminal cancer, and has cashed in her life savings to take her two estranged sisters cruising into the sunset for a dose of HRT – Husband Replacement Therapy. But is Ruby being courageous or ruthlessly selfish?

When the body of a mysterious woman is found to be carrying the phone number of James Bond, Bond is called in by M to help the investigation. But before he can even reach headquarters he is nearly run off the road in a high-speed motorway chase. Someone wants Bond dead.

Heroic bookseller Laurent Letellier comes across an abandoned handbag on a Parisian street. There's nothing in the bag to indicate who it belongs to, although there's all sorts of other things in it. Laurent feels a strong impulse to find the owner and tries to puzzle together who she might be from the contents of the bag. Especially a red notebook with her jottings, which really makes him want to meet her. Without even a name to go on, and only a few of her possessions to help him, how is he to find one woman in a city of millions?

The Committee, an international cabal of industrialists and media barons, is on the verge of privatizing all information. Dear Diary, an idealistic online Underground, stands in the way of that takeover, using radical politics, classic spycraft, and technology that makes Big Data look like dial-up. Into this secret battle stumbles an unlikely trio: Leila Majnoun, a disillusioned non-profit worker; Leo Crane, an unhinged trustafarian; and Mark Deveraux, a phony self-betterment guru who works for the Committee.

Qualityland, Marc-Uwe Kling's first book to be translated into English, is a brilliantly clever, illuminating satire in the tradition of Kurt Vonnegut, Douglas Adams, and George Orwell that offers a visionary, frightening, and all-too funny glimpse at a near future we may be hurtling toward faster than it's at all comfortable to admit. So why delay any longer? TheShop already knows you're going to love this book. You may as well head to the cash register, crack the covers, and see why that is for yourself.

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.

Le timbre légèrement éraillé de Stéphane Ronchewski vous plonge dans un récit haletant et plein d'humour. Il aura suffi d'une seule mauvaise, très mauvaise idée. Rien de plus. Un 31 décembre, dans une petite ville suédoise, un individu entre dans une banque pour la braquer, ressort bredouille, et fait malencontreusement irruption dans un appartement pendant une visite groupée. Ce qui est évidemment une très mauvaise idée, puisque le braquage se transforme alors en prise d'otage.

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...

In Modern Manners, cultural guru P. J. O'Rourke provides the essential accessory for the truly contemporary man or woman - a rulebook for living in a world without rules. Traditionally, good manners were a means of becoming as bland and invisible as everyone else, and thus of avoiding calling attention to one's own awkwardness and stupidity.

In the wake of her parents’ death, Aretha, a habitually single Black lawyer, has had only one obsession in life—success—until she falls for Aaron, a coffee entrepreneur. Moving into his Brooklyn brownstone to live along with his Hurricane Sandy-traumatized, illegal-gun-stockpiling, optimized-soy-protein-eating, bunker-building roommates, Aretha finds that her dreams of making partner are slipping away, replaced by an underground world, one of selling guns and training for a doomsday that’s maybe just around the corner.