Humor & Satire

The week of her wedding, The Bride is visited by a bird she recognizes as her dead grandmother because of the cornflower blue line beneath her eyes, her dubious expression, and the way she asks: What is the internet? Her grandmother is a parakeet. She says not to get married. She says: Go and find your brother. In the days that follow, The Bride's march to the altar becomes a wild and increasingly fragmented, unstable journey that bends toward the surreal and forces her to confront matters long buried.

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. 

Size does matter in these delightfully tiny tales populated with narcoleptic drivers, bickering backers, suspicious spouses, and other memorable characters. Full of dark humor, intrigue, and absurdity, this collection of slightly sinister (and occasionally sweet) stories delivers a bite-size listener experience to satisfy any literary craving. 

The latest installment in the Body Movers series! Carlotta Wren's life is entering new territory - a new career path, a new direction in her love life, and possibly new family members to uncover. A big part of moving on, though, means leaving people and other pieces of her past behind...which might be harder than she realized. Especially when moving forward means walking through a minefield of mysterious discoveries about the people she loves, the the people she wants not to love.

As part of a family where life happens to you, 15-year-old Carasine Busey is devastated but not surprised when her family drops everything in Sweet Hollow, Louisiana to follow her dad's shaky career as a welder. It's not especially shocking, either, when he abandons them all shortly after they settle into their new home in the city. Carasine, her mom Rhonda, and the rest of the Busey clan have adapted to roll with the punches. It's not until Carasine gets a second chance with an unlikely pair of long-lost relatives that she realizes her path in life might be up to her to navigate.

Darcie Weatherby has a full plate - a preteen and sixteen-year-old twins, a wayward grandmother, a nightmare boss, and a manipulative ex-husband. The last thing she needs are hot flashes. Especially ones that start fires. Burning her boss’s house down was a total accident. Honest. It doesn’t take long before Darcie realizes she’s running on borrowed time. Unless she figures out a way to get these hot flashes under control, there’s a very good chance she’ll spontaneously combust at the Founder’s Day Masquerade Ball and leave her children motherless.

Narrated by a 13,000-year-old extinct mammoth, this is the (mostly) true story of how a collection of prehistoric creatures came to be on sale at a natural history auction in New York in 2007. By tracing how and when these fossils were unearthed, Mammoth leads us on a funny and fascinating journey from the Pleistocene epoch to 19th-century America and beyond, revealing how ideas about science and religion have shaped our world.

Like all good Chinese children, Andrea Tang is doing her best to fulfil all her mother’s plans for her life: she’s on track to become partner at a top law firm in Singapore, she has a beautiful apartment in the right postcode and a perfect boyfriend who is practically made of husband material. Except that those plans are unravelling fast: there’s an unfairly attractive new lawyer out to steal her promotion, she has credit-card debt up to her eyeballs, her perfect boyfriend is now her perfect ex-boyfriend....

Stella worried about leaving their dog, Oro, so soon after they'd rescued the abused lab. Little did she know how Oro would react to her being gone.  

Call it superstition, but when a guy bats as hot as Brooks Elliott, you don’t mess with what’s working. And what’s working is him keeping his pants zipped and doing all of his scoring on the field. So when I hear he’s planning to ditch his V-card now that he’s been traded to baseball’s lovable losers - a.k.a. my home team and my reason for living every March through October - I do what any rational, dedicated, obsessed fan would do. I make a plan to stop him. But the thing about stopping him is that it requires spending time with him. Lots. And lots. And lots of time.

Meet the ultra-rational Dr Newton Barlow. Cool, cynical, scientific, he’s the last man you’d want to be a bridge between the living and the dead. But with his academic reputation in tatters, and nothing to lose but his few remaining marbles, the great skeptic is about to discover that the past that haunts him will be nothing compared to his ghost-ridden future.

Regan is holding a winning lottery ticket. Good-bye to the boyfriend who never had her back, and so long to the job she can’t stand! Except it’s all a bit too good to be true. When Regan gets pranked, she finds herself jobless, homeless and boyfriend-less in one fell swoop. Luckily her friendly seaside community provides a beacon of hope, proving to Regan that sometimes you really can rely on the kindness of others - and one local in particular, a handsome Fireman called Charlie, helps Regan realise that this could be her chance for a fresh start.

She is in her 20s, stuck living at home in small-town Topsham with an academic mother who has no time for pep-talks or consolation. The one saving grace is that her friend Billie still works at the pub down the road, but even the pub is losing its appeal. Feeling desperate to do something with her life and with no real plan (but the mother of all hangovers), Scarlett picks up her stuff and moves to London. But moving isn’t a miracle cure, and she ends up facing exactly the same problems she was desperate to escape.

The aim of this book is to entertain the listener and to bring a bit of laughter into the world. Written by his agent, Noah F. N. Hope, they told him to make his grammar good. "How can I?" he said. "My gram-ma died when I was young. Can't bring her back, you fool." This sums up the level of this book about the hilarious and smutty story of the spoof country singer, Dwayne Crokum who could sell the idea that he was good to the unsuspecting public. It tries to answer the question about whether he is alive or dead and who cares, anyway. 

Inflicting Christian names like Jefferson Youll on a young lad already saddled with a surname like Patbottom is a sufficient handicap for anyone, but if you have the misfortune to be educated at Watlington County Grammar and end up as thick as a plank, life gets very tricky indeed. Settling for Jyp and braving a succession of dead-end jobs, he finds sanctuary in a government statistics department dealing with figures.

If we were as tiny as ants to another being, what would they make of our philosophies? The great satirist Voltaire imagines alien visitors who have opinions. Bedtime stories are narrated by the world's most celebrated voices....

Meet Eleanor Oliphant: She struggles with appropriate social skills and tends to say exactly what she's thinking....

In the year 2038, there’s only one destination that can play host to the world’s wealthiest adventure seekers: the Pengalaman Island Resort and Virtual Reality Theme Park....

Call it superstition, but when a guy bats as hot as Brooks Elliott, you don’t mess with what’s working - him keeping his pants zipped and doing all of his scoring on the field. I hear he’s planning to ditch his V-card now that he’s been traded to my home team and plan to stop him....

Heads Will Roll is an Audible Original from Saturday Night Live star Kate McKinnon and her cocreator/costar (and real-life sister) Emily Lynne....

An orphan’s life is harsh - and often short - in the mysterious island city of Camorr. But young Locke Lamora dodges death and slavery, becoming a thief under the tutelage of a gifted con artist. Locke is the leader of a band of light-fingered brothers known as the Gentleman Bastards....

The world will end on Saturday. Next Saturday. Just before dinner, according to The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch, the world's only completely accurate book of prophecies....

A classic in the black literary tradition, The Spook who Sat by the Door is both a comment on the civil rights problems in the United States in the late 1960s and a serious attempt to focus on the issue of black militancy....

Mark Manson turns his gaze from the inevitable flaws within each individual self to the endless calamities taking place in the world around us....

Set adrift by his pirate crew, Pocket of Dog Snogging - last seen in The Serpent of Venice - washes up on the sun-bleached shores of Greece, where he hopes to dazzle the Duke with his comedic brilliance and become his trusted fool....

A masterpiece of satire, this classic has entertained and enlightened readers the world over with its sly and ironic portrayal of human life from the vantage point of Screwtape, a highly placed assistant to "Our Father Below"....

A wickedly clever, tenderhearted, and intricately plotted novel about a hard-luck lawyer's refusal to concede defeat, even as fate, the court system, and a gang of untouchable con artists conspire against him....

After her former band shot to superstardom without her, Claire reluctantly agrees to a gig as a playgroup musician for wealthy infants on New York's Park Avenue.... 

An international sensation, this hilarious, feel-good novel is narrated by an oddly charming and socially challenged genetics professor on an unusual quest: to see if he is capable of true love....

Set in Italy during World War II, this is the story of the incomparable, malingering bombardier Yossarian, a hero who is furious because thousands of people he has never met are trying to kill him....

Overworked and underappreciated, single mom Amy Byler needs a break. So when the guilt-ridden husband who abandoned her shows up and offers to take care of their kids for the summer, she accepts his offer and escapes rural Pennsylvania for New York City....

Make sure the kids aren’t around! Nick Offerman presents this collection of 12 short stories written in the style of a classic kids' tale, but with a decidedly dark and adult approach....

A gargantuan, mind-altering comedy about the Pursuit of Happiness in America set in an addicts' halfway house and a tennis academy, and featuring the most endearingly screwed-up family to come along in recent fiction....

For two sworn enemies, anything can happen during the Hawaiian trip of a lifetime - even love....

On the eve of her wedding to Nicholas Young, heir to one of the greatest fortunes in Asia, Rachel should be over the moon....

People say Beartown is finished. A tiny community nestled deep in the forest, it is slowly losing ground to the ever encroaching trees. But down by the lake stands an old ice rink....

For Susan Green, messy emotions don’t fit into the equation of her perfectly ordered life. She has a flat that is ideal for one, a job that suits her passion for logic, and an “interpersonal arrangement”....

In a sleepy seaside town in Maine, recently widowed Eveleth "Evvie" Drake rarely leaves her large, painfully empty house nearly a year after her husband’s death in a car crash. Everyone in town, even her best friend, Andy, thinks grief keeps her locked inside....

After a brutal battle with the underworld that nearly destroyed him, Locke and his trusted sidekick, Jean, fled the island city of their birth and landed on the exotic shores of Tal Verrar to nurse their wounds. But even at the westernmost edge of civilization, they can’t rest for long....

When Nicholas Young hears that his grandmother, Su Yi, is on her deathbed, he rushes to be by her bedside - but he's not alone....

A dance club full of bodies. Cause of death - a mystery. The lone survivor - a man, raving like a lunatic, wearing only a deerstalker hat. Now, the man who calls himself Sherman Holmes is being studied like a lab rat by a top-secret government agency....

From the author of the instant New York Times best-seller Tenth of December comes a darkly comic short story....

Elsa is seven years old and different. Her grandmother is 77 years old and crazy, standing-on-the-balcony-firing-paintball-guns-at-men-who-want-to-talk-about-Jesus crazy....

The hero of John Kennedy Toole's incomparable, Pulitzer Prize-winning comic classic is one Ignatius J. Reilly, "huge, obese, fractious, fastidious, a latter-day Gargantua"....

It was a day like any other day for Marina Trahan...until she caught her husband in bed with another woman. Before that eye-opening wake-up call, Marina would have described her life as average or uneventful, maybe even boring. But now, chaos and confusion reign supreme....