Humourous Satires

The richest, most depraved man on Earth, Malachi Constant, is offered a chance to take a space journey to distant worlds with a beautiful woman at his side. Of course, there's a catch to the invitation....

Breakfast of Champions (1973) provides frantic, scattershot satire and a collage of Vonnegut's obsessions. His recurring cast of characters and American landscape was perhaps the most controversial of his canon; it was felt by many at the time to be a disappointing successor to Slaughterhouse-Five, which had made Vonnegut's literary reputation.

Cuando las puertas de la iglesia se cierran, algo peculiar sucede: las figuras de santos y vírgenes cobran vida. San Antonio, cansado de sentirse inútil, decide lanzarse a cumplir el sueño de Leslie: conocer Acapulco antes de quedarse ciega. Así comenzarán un viaje que pondrá todo de cabeza.

When Chaz Perron's wife discovers that he is running a scam (posing as a marine biologist to doctor water samples so that an agribusiness tycoon can continue illegally dumping fertilizer into the Everglades), he pushes her overboard from a cruise liner. Unlucky for Chaz, Joey survives clutching a bale of Jamaican pot. Rescued from the Atlantic by a former police officer, Mick Stranahan, she decides not to report him but instead haunt and taunt him, with Mick's help, by playing dead.

I fell in love with Mr. Darcy on a reality TV show. Cue the happily ever after. Can you believe it? Me, Emma Brady, the girl who managed to turn reality TV humiliation into a real-life fairy tale, has fallen head over heels for my own Mr. Darcy while the entire nation watched. Yep, I'm the living proof that even the most unlikely of matches can light up the screen. And guess what? Hold onto your tiaras because now my Mr. Darcy has gone and proposed, complete with a promise of happily ever after in his posh English manor. Cue the confetti cannons and unicorns, right? Not so fast. Life ...

The year is 2108, and the North American Commonwealth is bursting at the seams. For welfare rats like Andrew Grayson, there are only two ways out of the crime-ridden and filthy welfare tenements: You can hope to win the lottery and draw a ticket on a colony ship settling off-world...or you can join the service. With the colony lottery a pipe dream, Andrew chooses to enlist in the armed forces for a shot at real food, a retirement bonus, and maybe a ticket off Earth.

Smith Babbitt is in the prime of his life: he’s only 25 years into his 89-year lifespan. He knows this because of Timmy®, the mysterious app that can tell you with infallible accuracy how old you will be when you die. Smith still has 64 years to go. But lately he’s been in a rut, and his long lifespan is starting to feel like a sentence.

Tom Wolfe's best-selling modern classic tells the story of Sherman McCoy, an elite Wall Street bond trader who has it all: wealth, power, prestige, a Park Avenue apartment, a beautiful wife, and an even more beautiful mistress - until one wrong turn sends Sherman spiraling downward into a humiliating fall from grace. A car accident in the Bronx involving Sherman, his girlfriend, and two young lower-class Black men sets a match to the incendiary racial and social tensions of 1980s New York City.

Campbell Flynn, art historian, professor, and fêted fixture of the literati, always knew that when his life came crashing down, it would happen in public—yet he never imagined that a single year in London would expose so much. He’s never taken other people half as seriously as they take themselves, which is the first of his mistakes. The second is a new project: opportunistic and precisely calibrated to rake in a fortune.

Pocket has been Lear's cherished fool for years. So naturally Pocket is at his brainless, elderly liege's side when Lear demands that his kids swear to him their undying love and devotion. Of course Goneril and Regan are only too happy to brownnose Dad. But Cordelia believes that her father's request is kind of...well...stupid, and her blunt honesty ends up costing her her rightful share of the kingdom and earns her a banishment to boot.

Candace Chen, a millennial drone self-sequestered in a Manhattan office tower, is devoted to routine. With the recent passing of her Chinese immigrant parents, she’s had her fill of uncertainty. She’s content just to carry on: She goes to work, troubleshoots the teen-targeted Gemstone Bible, watches movies in a Greenpoint basement with her boyfriend. So Candace barely notices when a plague of biblical proportions sweeps New York.

An ambitious mother puts her art career on hold to stay at home with her newborn son, but the experience does not match her imagination. Two years later, she steps into the bathroom for a break from her toddler's demands, only to discover a dense patch of hair on the back of her neck. In the mirror, her canines suddenly look sharper than she remembers. Her husband, who travels for work five days a week, casually dismisses her fears from faraway hotel rooms.

For a policeman, there can be few things worse than a serial killer loose in your city. Except, perhaps, a serial killer who targets coppers, and a city on the brink of bloody revolution. For Commander Sam Vimes, it all feels horribly familiar. Caught on the roof of a very magical building during a storm, he's found himself back in his own rough, tough past without even the clothes he was standing up in when the lightning struck. Living in the past is hard, especially when your time travel companion is a serial killer who knows where you live.

Fat and friendless, carer to her mother by day and a secret binge eater by night, 28-year-old Alison hates her life. She feels powerless to help herself until one day she encounters the person she would like to be and determines to transform herself. Admiration soon turns to obsession, and as Alison loses weight she discovers she’s capable of things she never imagined. Will she get the life she desires or the life she deserves?

"The chief end I propose to myself in all my labors is to vex the world rather than divert it," wrote Jonathan Swift in a letter to his friend Alexander Pope. Vexing works collected here are "A Modest Proposal," "Directions to Servants," "The Art of Political Lying," "A Digression Concerning the Critics," and "Sweetness and Light."

The City Watch needs men! But what it's got includes Corporal Carrot (technically a dwarf), Lance-Constable Cuddy (really a dwarf), Lance-Constable Detritus (a troll), Lance-Constable Angua (a woman...most of the time) and Corporal Nobbs (disqualified from the human race for shoving). And they need all the help they can get, because someone in Ankh-Morpork has been getting dangerous ideas - about crowns and legendary swords and destiny.

The Bennet family of Longbourn, Hertfordshire, had long been known to its neighbours as exceptionally learned though eccentric, but was tolerated because the first Bennets settled there more than four hundred years before, just after the great plague. Both the grandfather and father of the master, Mr. Thomas Bennet, married blue-stocking wives from the Continent. These circumstances had a profound effect on Mrs. Bennet and her five daughters. Because of this broader worldview, the Bennet family was more aware of, and affected by some historical events of the period far outside the twenty-...

Inessential Pharmacology is a playful romp through the data behind psychiatric medications. The point of the book is to teach my readers how to understand what a medicine does. I give them the same tools I use, as a practicing psychiatrist, with a lot more humor than used to teach me. We go through a list of common medications, and using those as examples, we learn how to read research about those same medications. We learn about charts, graphs, tables, and the lawsuits and side effects that made these drugs famous. They also made pharmaceutical companies billions. This is a book written ...

In Leonard Wibberley's classic political satire, a tiny backwards country decides the only way to survive a sudden economic downturn is to declare war on the United States and lose to get foreign aid - but things don't go according to plan. The Mouse That Roared was made into a successful feature film starring Peter Sellers. Books in The Grand Fenwick Series: Books 2 through 5 are best read after The Mouse That Roared, but all of the books can be read and enjoyed at any point in the series. Book 1: The Mouse That Roared Book 2: The Mouse On The Moon Book 3: The Mouse On Wall Street Book 4: ...

They say that diplomacy is a gentle art. That mastering it is a lifetime's work. But you do need a certain inclination in that direction. It's not something you can just pick up on the job. A few days ago Sam Vimes was a copper - an important copper, true - chief of police - but still, at his core, a policeman. But today he is an ambassador - to the mysterious, fat-rich country of Uberwald. Today, Sam Vimes is also a man on the run. At some point during his ambassadorship, things went very wrong. It's snowing. It's freezing.