Satire Comedy

Simon Rich is "one of the funniest writers in America" (The Daily Beast) - a humorist who draws comparisons to Douglas Adams (The New York Times Book Review) and James Thurber and P.G. Wodehouse (The Guardian). With Hits and Misses, he's back with a hilarious new collection of stories about dreaming big and falling flat, about ordinary people desperate for stardom and the stars who are bored by having it all.

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.

The four Jacobson children were raised to respect the value of a dollar. Their mother reused tea bags and refused to pay retail; their father taught them to budget before he taught them to ride a bike. And yet, now that they’re adults, their financial lives are in disarray. The siblings reunite when their newly widowed father puts their Jersey Shore beach house on the market. Packing up childhood memories isn’t easy, especially when there’s other drama brewing.

The new book censor hasn't slept soundly in weeks. By day he combs through manuscripts at a government office, looking for anything that would make a book unfit to publish-allusions to queerness, unapproved religions, any mention of life before the Revolution. By night the characters of literary classics crowd his dreams, and pilfered novels pile up in the house he shares with his wife and daughter. As the siren song of forbidden reading continues to beckon, he descends into a netherworld of resistance fighters, undercover booksellers, and outlaw librarians.

Spike is an English bull terrier with a keen comedic eye for human foibles. He rockets to TV and internet fame after appearing on The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon, along with his master, Bud, who hosts a local morning show in High Point, North Carolina. Spike and Bud soon hit the fast track to bigger stardom when Bud signs on for a talk show in New York City.

Jason Fitger is a beleaguered professor of creative writing and literature at Payne University, a small and not very distinguished liberal arts college in the midwest. His department is facing draconian cuts and squalid quarters, while one floor above them the Economics Department is getting lavishly remodeled offices. His once-promising writing career is in the doldrums, as is his romantic life, in part as the result of his unwise use of his private affairs for his novels.

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.

"All I want is to be a success.That's all I ask." Joe fails to sell a single set of the Encyclopedia Britannica in six months. Then he fails to sell a single Electrolux and must eat hundreds of pieces of homemade pie, served up by his would-be customers who feel so sorry for him. Holed up in his trailer, Joe finds an outlet his for frustrations in a series of ingenious sexual fantasies, and at last strikes gold. His brain storm, Lightning Rods, Inc., will take Joe to the very top - and to the very heart of corporate insanity.

Jason Fitger may be the last faculty member the dean wants for the job, but he’s the only professor available to chaperone Payne University’s annual “Experience: Abroad” (he has long been on the record objecting to the absurd and gratuitous colon between the words) occurring during the three weeks of winter term. Among his charges are a claustrophobe with a juvenile detention record, a student who erroneously believes he is headed for the Caribbean, a pair of unreconciled lovers, a set of undifferentiated twins, and one young woman who has never been away from her cat before.

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 Nollop, author of the immortal phrase containing all the letters of the alphabet: “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.” Now Ella finds herself acting to save her friends, family, and fellow citizens from the encroaching totalitarianism of the island’s Council, which has banned the use of certain letters of the alphabet as they fall from a memorial statue of Nevin Nollop.

After his wife, Sarah, dies, K. loses his metaphorical capacity, becoming so wedded to the notion of clarity that he infuriates everyone, friends and strangers alike. When he intervenes in an armed robbery, K. finds himself both an inadvertent hero and the star of a new reality television program. Together with Claire, a grocery store clerk with a sharp tongue and a yen for celebrity, he travels the country, ruffling feathers and gaining fame at the intersection of American politics and entertainment.

What do we believe? And in God's name why? Lewis Black has the answers. Or at least his answers. He survived Hebrew school and a bar mitzvah (barely), was a 60's college student who saw the parallels between religious rapture and drug-induced visions (even if none of his friends did), explored the self-actualization movement of the 70's (and the self-indulgence it engendered), and turned a cynical eye toward politicians who don the cloak of religious rectitude to cover up their own hypocrisy.

Nestled among Seattle's skyscrapers, The Zephyr Holdings Building is a bleak rectangle topped by an orange-and-black logo that gives no hint of Zephyr's business. Lack of clarity, it turns out, is Zephyr's defining characteristic. The floors are numbered in reverse. No one has ever seen the CEO or glimpsed his office on the first (i.e., top) floor. Yet every day people clip on their ID tags, file into the building, sit at their desks, and hope that they're not about to be outsourced.

Being immortal is not all it once was. Yes, the 12 Greek gods of Olympus are alive and well in the 21st century, but they are crammed together in a London town house: and are none too happy about it. Even more disturbing, their powers are waning.

Rhoda West is Silicon Valley’s favorite female CEO: the luminously charismatic founder of the fast-growing startup Radical, a wellness company whose core mission is the betterment of women’s lives. Rhoda’s Instagram page offers intimate glimpses of her personal life alongside promotions for the cult-status products developed in the Well, Radical’s secretive lab.

Walter Reddie is a washed-up former astronaut who takes it upon himself to build a rocket ship to rescue his cousin, who is stuck on the International Space Station after a mission gone wrong. If America won’t rescue its astronauts, Walter will do it himself. Violating numerous laws, common sense, logic, and reason, Walter Reddie becomes a lightning rod for people who aren’t ready to lay down and die just yet.

It's a sad and eerie harbinger of our times that the Oprah-watching, crystal-rubbing, Whole Foods-shopping moms and their whipped attorney husbands have taken the ability to reason away from the poor schlub who makes the Bloody Marys. What we used to settle with common sense or a fist, we now settle with hand sanitizer and lawyers. Adam Carolla has had enough of this insanity and he's here to help us get our collective balls back.

Sam Bennett is the last of a dying breed, a former Mad Man, now made redundant after 30 years at the same advertising agency. Left with his awards and a case of Bulgarian whiskey (which he still can’t remember buying), Sam retreats to his home, awaits the summer arrival of his daughter and crazy son-in-law, Muller, is plagued by panic attacks and has an incident involving a pressed ham on a liquor store window with a young security guard named Max. .

Morgan Beale is a pop icon - and hates every second of it. He begins adapting the latest best seller, The Chihuahua in the Blue Prada Bag, into a blockbuster movie just before his celebutante wife starts remodeling their Hollywood home, driving Beale to a hotel. Dodging the paparazzi one morning on his way to Starbucks, he spots his writing partner, Luke, who has been dead for over a decade, and who is staring into a mysterious hole in the ground....

Emily Forrest runs Exalted, the hottest astrology account on Instagram, from her studio apartment in Los Angeles. Burned out on meme-making and listicles, Emily's passion for astrology is waning despite her gift for deciphering the signs, until she comes across a birth-chart that could potentially change her mind. Beau Rubidoux's planets are aligned, each paired with its optimum sign—his chart is exalted. She decides that Beau, a well-connected photographer in Echo Park, could potentially be the love of her life and help her fulfill her true destiny: to be a star.