Humourous Satires

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.

Gerald, a mid-level employee of a New York-based public relations firm, has been uploaded into the company’s internal Slack channels - at least his consciousness has. His colleagues assume it’s an elaborate gag to exploit the new work-from-home policy, but now that Gerald’s productivity is through the roof, his bosses are only too happy to let him work from...wherever he says he is. Faced with the looming abyss of a disembodied life online, Gerald enlists his coworker Pradeep to help him escape and to find out what happened to his body.

Meet Phluttr - a diabolically addictive new social network and a villainess, heroine, enemy, and/or bestie to millions. Phluttr has ingested every fact and message ever sent to, from, and about her innumerable users. Her capabilities astound her makers - and they don't even know the tenth of it. But what's the purpose of this stunning creation? Is it a front for something even darker and more powerful than the NSA?

Wickedly narrated by David Stifel, and written in 1729, this satiric essay on how to solve Ireland's chronic poverty is perhaps more shocking today than when it was written. In the 1960s, when Peter O'Toole did a public reading of this piece in Dublin, he very nearly started a riot. Newspapers the following day lambasted O'Toole's "shocking bad taste." Whether shocking satire, or Monty-Pythonesque surrealism, this essay has continually managed to offend people for well over 3 centuries. Enjoy! (and Thank You!)

H.H. Munro (Saki) is one of the undisputed masters of the short story. In this complete compendium, the full gamut of his subjects and themes is experienced. His stories are imbued with humorous satire, biting irony, and often the macabre, all of which have one target: the stupidities and hypocrisies of Edwardian upper-class society.

Bret Ellis, the narrator of Lunar Park, is the bestselling writer whose first novel Less Than Zero catapulted him to international stardom while he was still in college. In the years that followed he found himself adrift in a world of wealth, drugs, and fame, as well as dealing with the unexpected death of his abusive father.

Richard Brautigan's world is one of gentle magic and marvelous laughter, of the incredibly beautiful and the beautifully incredible. Trout Fishing in America is a pseudonym for the miraculous. A journey that begins at the foot of the Benjamin Franklin statue in San Francisco's Washington Square, that wanders through the wonders of America's rural waterways, and that ends, inevitably, with mayonnaise. Funny, wild, and sweet, Trout Fishing in America is an incomparable guidebook to the delights of exploration.

Satire is a kind of preaching. Satire pervades Scripture. Satire treats the foibles of sinners with a less than perfect tenderness. But if a Christian employs satire today, he is almost immediately called to account for his "insensitive" and "unloving" behavior. Yet Scripture shows that the central point of some religious controversies is to give offense. When Christ was confronted with ecclesiastical obstinacy and other forms of arrogance, He showed us a godly pattern for giving offense.

The future is blue - endless blue...except for a few small places that float across the hot, drowned world left behind by long-gone fossil fuel-guzzlers. One of those patches is a magical place called Garbagetown. Tetley Abednego is the most beloved girl in Garbagetown, but she’s the only one who knows it. She’s the only one who knows a lot of things: that Garbagetown is the most wonderful place in the world, that it’s full of hope, that you can love someone and 66% hate them all at the same time.

Academy Award winner Dustin Hoffman gives an understated and exemplary performance of this satiric look at the unreality of American media culture. Chance, the enigmatic gardener, becomes Chauncey Gardiner after getting hit by a limo belonging to a Wall Street tycoon. The whirlwind that follows brings Chance to his new status of political policy advisor and possible vice presidential candidate. His garden-variety political responses, inspired by television, become heralded as visionary, and he is soon a media icon.

A searing portrayal of Vienna's bourgeoisie, it begins with the arrival of an unnamed writer at an 'artistic dinner' hosted by a composer and his society wife-a couple he once admired and has come to loathe. The guest of honor, a distinguished actor from the Burgtheater, is late. As the other guests wait impatiently, they are seen through the critical eye of the writer, who narrates a silent but frenzied tirade against these former friends, most of whom have been brought together by Joana, a woman they buried earlier that day.

Mike has teamed up with director Eric Martin to adapt the novelization into a fully immersive cinematic audio experience, and an epic all-star cast has come together to introduce Stinker to a whole new generation of fans! It's Smokey and the Bandit meets Every Which Way But Loose meets Smokey and the Bandit Parts 2 and 3. Feel the thrill as Stinker teams up with old pals Boner and Jumbo, plus new friends Buck and Rascal the Chimp, for a crazy ride across the highways and byways of Bicentennial America.

I’m a cargo pilot. In the industry, I’m known as a “Freight Dog.” I fly canceled checks and other types of high-value cargo around the country, mostly at night, in airplanes that are older than I am. Flying freight - or “work” as we call it - in small, twin-engine aircraft is a lesser known side of the aviation world. Our day starts when banker’s hours end. Thousands of flights move millions of pounds of work from city to city every night while the rest of the country is asleep.

Bernadette Fox is notorious. To her Microsoft-guru husband, she's a fearlessly opinionated partner; to fellow private-school mothers in Seattle, she's a disgrace; to design mavens, she's a revolutionary architect, and to 15-year-old Bee, she is a best friend and, simply, Mom. Then Bernadette disappears. It began when Bee aced her report card and claimed her promised reward: a family trip to Antarctica. But Bernadette's intensifying allergy to Seattle - and people in general - has made her so agoraphobic that a virtual assistant in India now runs her most basic errands.

My name is Kitty Collins and I’m a serial killer. I don’t want to kill. It’s just so hard to resist. Some men really, really deserve it. Men like Blaze Bundy, an anonymous influencer spreading misogyny online. He’s making it very hard for me to control my murderous urges. Meanwhile I’m in the South of France to watch my mother marry a man I’ve never met. I should be drinking cocktails and focusing on my tan, not plotting a murder. But a woman’s work is never done. Surely one more teensy little kill wouldn’t hurt, would it?

Samuel Pickwick, founder and chairman of the Pickwick Club, engages three fellow members to accompany him on a journey. By coach they’ll travel to the outreaches of London to explore, observe, and report back on the quaint wonders of the English countryside. What transpires is a picaresque romp of misadventures, hair-raising challenges, and romantic follies entangling the fates of a riot of colorful characters - a passel of villains, spinsters, poets, and sportsmen - and the unworldly Pickwick himself, who has much to learn about life outside his gentleman’s club.

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.

This program is read by the author. Blythe Roberson’s sharp observational humor is met by her openhearted willingness to revel in the ugliest warts and shimmering highs of choosing to live our lives amongst other humans. She collects her crushes like ill-cared-for pets, skewers her own suspect decisions, and assures listeners that any date you can mess up, she can top tenfold. And really, was that date even a date in the first place?

Ever meet a hot billionaire while your hand's in a toilet in the men's room of one of his stores? No? So it really is just me. Hmm. When you're a mystery shopper, you get paid to humiliate yourself, all in the name of improving customer service. Romance isn't in my job description. But the day I met Declan McCormick it was love at first flush. Until I nearly castrated him with my EpiPen. How Hot Guy and Toilet Girl became an item involves my crazy mom, a trip to the ER, my homicidal cat, my fake wife, and true love.

An unnamed paralegal, brought back to life through a controversial process, maneuvers through a near-future world that both needs and resents him. As the United States president spouts anti-reanimation rhetoric and giant pharmaceutical companies rake in profits, the man falls in love with lawyer Faustina Godínez. His world expands as he meets her network of family and friends, setting him on a course to discover his first-life history, which the reanimation process erased.