Satire Comedy

Newlywed Angus Lordie has been booked by his bride into what he must not call the loony bin; Bruce’s first encounter with hot wax brings more anguish than he bargained for; and Bertie's birthday dreams of scout camp and a penknife look set to be replaced by a game of Royal Weddings and a gender-neutral doll. But fate, an amorous Bedouin, and the Dubai Tourist Authority conspire to transport Bertie's mother, Irene, to a warmer--if not a better--place.

A workhouse orphan, Oliver experiences the terror and brutality of the criminal underworld. His companions, a thief, a whore, a pickpocket, and a fence, are destined for gruesome ends, but Oliver emerges unscathed from the darkness of the underworld.

Flann O'Brien's most popular and surrealistic novel concerns an imaginary, hellish village police force and a local murder.

Weird, satirical, and very funny, its popularity has suddenly increased with the mention of the novel in the TV series Lost.

Welcome to Sunset Academy, the most coveted elementary school in Miami Beach, where there are three categories of families: rich, wealthy, and ultra-wealthy. Perfectly tanned and smiling Charlotte Giordani is Sunset Academy’s alpha mom. With a sleek blowout and relentless charm, Charlotte’s brashness serves her well. She’s up for election as the PTA president and is riding high, having just secured a massive donation from billionaire Don Walker and his socialite wife Patricia.

Welcome to the Monkey House is a collection of Kurt Vonnegut's shorter works. Originally printed in publications as diverse as The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction and The Atlantic Monthly, what these superb stories share is Vonnegut's audacious sense of humor and extraordinary range of creative vision.

In this wry take on the post-apocalyptic horror novel, a pandemic has devastated the planet. The plague has sorted humanity into two types: the uninfected and the infected, the living and the living dead. Now the plague is receding, and Americans are busy rebuild­ing civilization under orders from the provisional govern­ment based in Buffalo. Their top mission: the resettlement of Manhattan.

An unambitious twenty-two-year-old, Darren lives in a Bed-Stuy brownstone with his mother, who wants nothing more than to see him live up to his potential as the valedictorian of Bronx Science. But Darren is content working at Starbucks in the lobby of a Midtown office building, hanging out with his girlfriend, Soraya, and eating his mother's home-cooked meals. All that changes when a chance encounter with Rhett Daniels, the silver-tongued CEO of Sumwun, NYC's hottest tech startup, results in an exclusive invitation for Darren to join an elite sales team on the thirty-sixth floor.

Sissy Hankshaw, an almost flawlessly beautiful small-town girl with big-time dreams, hitchhikes her way into your heart, your hopes, and your sleeping bag in Tom Robbins's magical, funny, and most famous novel. Follow Sissy's amazing odyssey from Virginia to chic Manhattan to the Dakota Badlands, where FBI agents, cowgirls, and ecstatic whooping cranes explode in a deliciously drawn-out climax.

"Monsieur Haneda était le supérieur de monsieur Omochi, qui était le supérieur de monsieur Saito, qui était le supérieur de mademoiselle Mori, qui était ma supérieure. Et moi, je n'étais la supérieure de personne. On pourrait dire les choses autrement. J'étais aux ordres de mademoiselle Mori, qui était aux ordres de monsieur Saito, et ainsi de suite, avec cette précision que les ordres pouvaient, en aval, sauter les échelons hiérarchiques. Donc, dans la compagnie Yumimoto, j'étais aux ordres de tout le monde."

These are the voyages of the starship A.S.F. Willful Child. Its ongoing mission: to seek out strange new worlds on which to plant the Terran flag, to subjugate and if necessary obliterate new life-forms, to boldly blow the... And so we join the not-terribly-bright but exceedingly cock-sure Captain Hadrian Sawback and his motley crew on board the Starship Willful Child for a series of devil-may-care, near-calamitous and downright chaotic adventures through "the infinite vastness of interstellar space".

Behold the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster (FSM), today’s fastest growing carbohydrate-based religion. According to church founder Bobby Henderson, the universe and all life within it were created by a mystical and divine being: the Flying Spaghetti Monster. What drives the FSM's devout followers, a.k.a. Pastafarians? Some say it’s the assuring touch from the FSM’s “noodly appendage”. Then there are those who love the worship service, which is conducted in pirate talk and attended by congregants in dashing buccaneer garb.

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.

Jeeves, not only a tireless servant to the feckless Bertie Wooster, is the saviour of a good many other individuals as well. The list is long: Bingo Little has cause to be grateful to Jeeves in the affair of the marooned cabinet minister; Sippy Sipperley, when he is persecuted by his former headmaster; Tuppy Glossop, in his foolhardy pursuit of Cora Bellinger the opera singer; not to mention Miss Dalgeish the dog-girl; Bertie's fat Uncle George when he brushes with the lower classes; even the dog McIntosh is returned to the dreaded Aunt Agatha through Jeeves' good offices.

Every Winter, the human population hibernates. Your name is Charlie Worthing, and it's your first season with the Winter Consuls, the committed but mildly unhinged group of misfits who are responsible for ensuring the hibernatory safe passage of the sleeping masses. You are investigating an outbreak of viral dreams which you dismiss as nonsense; nothing more than a quirky artifact borne of the sleeping mind. When the dreams start to kill people, it's unsettling. When you get the dreams, too, it's weird. When they start to come true, you begin to doubt your sanity.

The only lie told more often than "no, that looks totally cute on you" and "I got AIDS through oral" is "it gets better". Well, a lotta times it don't. Sometimes it just sucks less. But I promise you: Where there's a Willam, there's a way. But this isn't all about me (for once). It's about you and how you can suck less at a variety of things drag queens are so much better at than the average person.

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.

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.

From Sophia Bannion’s first day on the Storytelling team at HEBE, a luxury skincare/wellness company based in New York’s trendy SoHo neighborhood, it’s clear something is deeply amiss. But Sophia, pushing thirty, has plenty of skeletons in her closet next to the designer knockoffs and doesn’t care. Though she leads an outwardly charmed life, she aches for a deeper meaning to her flat existence—and a cure for her brutal nail-biting habit. She finds it all and more at HEBE, and with Tree Whitestone, HEBE’s charismatic founder and CEO.

Sie sind wieder da - das kommunistische Känguru und der stoische Kleinkünstler! Auf der Jagd nach dem höchst verdächtigen Pinguin rasen sie durch die ganze Welt. Spektakuläre Enthüllungen! Skandale! Intrigen! Ein Mord, für den sich niemand interessiert! Eine Verschwörung auf niedrigster Ebene! Ein völlig abstruser Weltbeherrschungsplan! Mit Spaß, Spannung und Schnapspralinen.

Valentine disparue... Qui la cherche vraiment ? Entre satire sociale, polar contemporain et romance lesbienne, le nouveau roman de Virginie Despentes est un road-book qui promène l'auditeur entre Paris et Barcelone, sur les traces de tous ceux qui ont connu Valentine, l'adolescente égarée... Les différents personnages se croisent sans forcément se rencontrer, et finissent par composer, sur un ton tendre et puissant, le portrait d'une époque.