Satire Comedy

Millie, 30, just can't pull it together. Misanthropic and morose, she spends her days killing time at a thankless temp job until she can return home to her empty apartment, where she oscillates between self-recrimination and mild delusion, fixating on all the little ways she might change her life. Then she watches TV until she drops off to sleep, and the cycle begins again. When the possibility of a full-time job offer arises, it seems to bring the better life she's envisioning within reach. But with it also comes the paralyzing realization of just how hollow that vision has become.

Honey Santana, impassioned, willful, possibly bipolar, self-proclaimed "queen of lost causes", has a scheme to help rid the world of irresponsibility, indifference, and dinnertime sales calls. She's taking rude, gullible Relentless, Inc., telemarketer Boyd Shreave and his less-than-enthusiastic mistress, Eugenie, into the wilderness of Florida's Ten Thousand Islands for a gentle lesson in civility. What she doesn't know is that she's being followed by her Honey-obsessed former employer.

Cats are skilled manipulators who can talk you into just about anything without a single word. They can get you to drop whatever you're doing and play with them. They can make you serve their dinner way ahead of schedule. They can get you to sit down right this instant and provide a lap. On the other hand, try getting a cat to do what you want.... While it's hard, persuading a cat is possible. And after that, persuading humans becomes a breeze, and that is what you will learn in this audiobook.

Con más de cien mil ejemplares vendidos, el fundador del Osho Meditation Center en México nos regala, en esta edición reloaded de su clásico ¡Me vale madres! (sin duda alguna el libro de meditación más original de todos) un nuevo mantra: ¡A huevo!

Anisa Ellahi dreams of being a translator of “great works of literature,” but instead mostly spends her days subtitling Bollywood movies, living off her parents’ generous allowance, and discussing the “underside of life” with her best friend, Naima. Anisa’s mediocre white boyfriend, Adam, only adds to her growing sense of inadequacy with his savant-level aptitude for languages, successfully leveraging his expansive knowledge into an enviable career. But when Adam learns to speak Urdu with native fluency practically overnight, Anisa forces him to reveal his secret.

The “best short story writer in English” (Time) is back with a masterful collection that explores ideas of power, ethics, and justice, and cuts to the very heart of what it means to live in community with our fellow humans. With his trademark prose—wickedly funny, unsentimental, and perfectly tuned—Saunders continues to challenge and surprise: here is a collection of prismatic, deeply resonant stories that encompass joy and despair, oppression and revolution, bizarre fantasy and brutal reality.

Would you pay to watch babies fight to the death? Only the wealthy and privileged have the kind of money that can pay for such vile entertainment. The first rule of Baby Fights is there are no rules. Babies can't follow rules. But with a certain persuasion they turn into rabid little monsters, and oh what a spectacle it is to see.

In 1919, far-flung patriots establish the Korean Provisional Government to protest the Japanese occupation of their country. This government-in-exile proves mostly symbolic, though, and after Japan’s defeat in World War II, the KPG dissolves and civil war erupts, resulting in the tragic North-South split that remains today.

Welcome to the wonderful world of under-evolved bosses, style-of-the-week buzzword management, hapless coworkers, and other worthy fodder. Sound like your company? Scott Adams, creator of the Dilbert comic strip about a harried but determined '90s antihero, brings you his hilarious take on the bizarre realities of life in corporate America.

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.

Amber Jamison can’t believe she’s about to become the latest victim of a serial killer. She’s savvy and street smart, so when she gets pushed into, of all things, a white windowless van, she is more angry than afraid. Things get even weirder when she’s miraculously saved by a mysterious woman . . . who promptly disappears. Who was she? And why is she hunting serial killers? You’d think escaping one psychopath would be enough, but Amber’s problems are just beginning.

It's 1994, and the former Yugoslavia is being torn apart. In England a gang of good-hearted young people are about to set off in a Ford Transit van armed with several sacks of rice and a half-written play. A play which will light a beacon of peace across the Balkans and, very probably, stop the war. Andrew would love to stop the war. He has one of the most comprehensively developed personal foreign policies of anyone working on a building site in the Greater Manchester area. He feels everyone should have a foreign policy, really. What sort of person doesn't?

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.

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.

This is the story of Jim Dixon, a hapless lecturer in medieval history at a provincial university who knows better than most that “there was no end to the ways in which nice things are nicer than nasty ones.” Kingsley Amis’s scabrous debut leads the audience through a gallery of emphatically English bores, cranks, frauds, and neurotics with whom Dixon must contend in one way or another in order to hold on to his cushy academic perch and win the girl of his fancy.

Welcome to Chromatacia, where life is strictly regulated by one’s limited color perception. Civilization has been rebuilt after an unspoken “Something that Happened” five hundred years before. Society is now color vision—segregated, everything dictated by an individual’s visual ability, and governed by the shadowy National Color in far-off Emerald City. Twenty-year-old Eddie Russett, a Red, is about to go on trial for a murder he didn’t commit, and he’s pretty certain to be sent on a one-way trip to the Green Room for execution by soporific color exposure.

Many view "hitting rock bottom" as a foundation on which to rebuild one's life, a place from which one can only ascend. Gamers know to search for a secret door leading down to the sewer.

Perhaps the most autobiographical (and deliberately least disciplined) of Vonnegut's novels, Slapstick (1976) is in the form of a broken family odyssey and is surely a demonstration of its eponymous title. The story centers on brother and sister twins, children of Wilbur Swain, who are in sympathetic and (possibly) telepathic communication and who represent Vonnegut's relationship with his own sister who died young of cancer almost two decades before the book's publication.

In Flatland, originally published in 1884, a humble square describes his two-dimensional world to benefit the inhabitants of Spaceland, the three-dimensional realm he discovers when he is visited by a being from beyond his plane. With dry wit and wild imagination, author Edwin Abbott Abbott builds a meticulous fantasy world rooted in an astute apprehension of psychology, politics, and social structures, as well as basic geometry. The story of Flatland, at once ridiculous and profound, delivers an incisive satire of social discourse that remains remarkably relevant today.

Seventh on Sports Illustrated's Top 100 Sports Books of All Time, Dan Jenkins' Semi-Tough is a raucous, politically incorrect football spoof starring New York Giants' redneck star Billy Clyde Puckett. As Puckett records the outrageous buildup to his team's Super Bowl clash with cross-town rivals the Jets, his best friend's voluptuous main squeeze puts some knee-buckling moves on him that he finds difficult to dodge.