Humourous Satires

It was just supposed to be a quick trip to the pet store for some cat food, but the universe had other plans for Florence Valentine. Good for nothing kids and some annoying store employees were giving her a hard time, and then things got worse when she was killed by a delivery truck. Instead of angels, pearly gates, and eternal rewards, a voice in her head keeps telling her that she’s become a dungeon core, whatever that is.

From visionary creator Kenya Barris (beloved TV sitcom Black-ish and the podcast Unusual Suspects). Starring comedy legends Jenifer Lewis, Cedric the Entertainer, and Niecy Nash-Betts, Big Age follows recently retired couple Dot and Butch Watts' reluctant relocation to their new Floridian home, Sunset Gardens, a senior community that is anything but relaxing.

Twenty-five-year-old rookie Repo Agent, Andrea Sloan, doesn't like accepting help from anyone - especially not arrogant musicians who are too charming for their own good. Even though she swore off men years ago, Andi finds herself drawn to handsome rockstar, Cooper Barnett, as he continually pops up in her life when she least expects it. Their budding relationship becomes even more complicated when Cooper talks Andi into letting him ride-along on one of her repos, and they come across a very naked, very dead body.

When Milan Patel visits his parents at their family-run motel in Montana, he's expecting the usual drama. But shortly after he arrives, his father mysteriously dies in the motel pool. Now everyone's a suspect. What was meant to be a quick trip becomes Milan's worst nightmare, as he races to solve his father's murder while confronting the past he tried to leave behind.

Yes, George Carlin is here with more of what he did better than any other comic: uproarious observations, laser-targeted crankiness, linguistic legerdemain, and inspired weirdness. ("If the shoe fits, get another just like it." "When you sneeze, all the numbers in your head go up by one.") Napalm & Silly Putty is just what his fans have been waiting for—another generous helping of notions, nonsense, assertions, assumptions, mockery, merriment, silliness, sarcasm, and, to be sure, plenty of disturbing references and toxic alienation.

In a renovated Gothic church on Long Island lives Jonathan Hemlock, an art professor and a world-renowned mountain climber who finances his black-market art collection by working as a freelance assassin. Now, Hemlock is being tricked into a hazardous assignment that involves an attempt to scale one of the most treacherous mountain peaks in the Swiss Alps: the Eiger. His target is one of his three fellow climbers. The problem is that the CII can't tell him which one.

A Signature Performance: Four-time Emmy Award winner David Hyde Pierce delivers an air of lovable self-importance in his rendition of the classic social satire that remains as fresh today as the day it was published.

They call me Big Pickle. It's not what you think. (Although that's true, too.) I happen to be the oldest Pickle in the family deli business. And we have the best salami. Take that one however you like. But when my father announces the franchise will go to the most profitable of the three brothers, I learn that even though I'm the eldest Pickle, I'm dead last. I hightail it to Texas to see what's happened to my restaurant, only to find a sassy little spitfire named Nova Strong in charge. She's amazing. She's sexy. She runs our deli like she owns it.

Because you know it's nonsense, but were never sure why.

Obituary writer Bud Stanley isn’t really living his best life. He’s fallen into a funk after a divorce. (She left him for another man, who, in fairness, was far more interesting.) He’s not doing his job well. He’s given up on dating. And he’s about to be fired for accidentally publishing his own obituary one mildly drunken night (though technically the company can’t legally fire a dead person). As Bud awaits his fate at work, he does the only logical thing: He goes to the wakes and funerals of total strangers to learn how to live again.

Emmy Award-winning actor Bryan Cranston (Breaking Bad, Malcom in the Middle) follows in the exasperated footsteps of Samuel L. Jackson, giving voice to the long-suffering father whose indifferent child will just not eat in this hilarious follow-up to Adam Mansbach's international best seller, Go the F--k to Sleep.

Desperate to escape their high-pressure life in Los Angeles, the Finch family moves to rural Oregon. But it doesn’t take long to learn that “small town” is not code for “stress-free.” As the new owners of Applegate's one and only general store, the Finches find that the simple life’s anything but simple when your little store is the town's only grocery store, gas station, hardware store, fire station, and occasional dentist’s office.

The adventuring industry drives the economy of Arth, a world much like our own but with more magic and fewer vowels. Monsters' hoards are claimed, bought by corporate interests, and sold off to plunder funds long before the Heroes' Guild actually kills the beasts. Of course, that's a terrible arrangement for the Shadowkin; orcs, goblins, kobolds, and their ilk must apply for to become Noncombatant Paper Carriers (or NPCs) to avoid being killed and looted by heroes.

Long live the bloodsuckers. On Planet X—formerly Earth, formerly functional—the nation has elected an Uber Vampire whose hunger isn’t metaphorical. His rule spreads through screens, signals, and devotion, draining the population dry while demanding adoration, obedience, and fluids. Preferably red. Nancy and John are retired, irritated, and profoundly unimpressed. When neighbors start hissing, bread is declared treason, and the sky turns grape-purple with suppression gas, they do what any sensible elders would do: form a resistance. Armed with duct tape, lemon bars, outlawed books, and...

Traumatized by the bombing of Dresden at the time he had been imprisoned, Pilgrim drifts through all events and history, sometimes deeply implicated, sometimes a witness. He is surrounded by Vonnegut's usual large cast of continuing characters (notably here the hack science fiction writer Kilgore Trout and the alien Tralfamadorians, who oversee his life and remind him constantly that there is no causation, no order, no motive to existence).

When a young, struggling screenwriter's greatest dream turns into a nightmare after her script is stolen by an uber-powerful male producer, she forms a surprising alliance with a former soap opera star harboring secrets of her own. Together, these two devise a daring, twisted plan to seek justice against the producer through the long-running soap opera Summer Breeze. They will turn the producer’s monstrosity into their art.

“Genius ... It is miraculous to read these pieces ... You must read The Best of Me.” —Andrew Sean Greer, New York Times Book Review For more than twenty-five years, David Sedaris has been carving out a unique literary space. A Sedaris story may seem confessional, but is also highly attuned...

Set in the world of the Victorian professional and landed classes, the story centres on Mr Harding, a clergyman of great personal integrity who is nevertheless in possession of an income from a charity far in excess of the sum devoted to it.

Age has done everything except mellow the characters in Kingsley Amis’s The Old Devils, which turns its humane and ironic gaze on a group of Welsh married couples who have been spending their golden years—when “all of a sudden the evening starts starting after breakfast”—nattering, complaining, reminiscing, and, above all, drinking. This more or less orderly social world is thrown off-kilter, however, when two old friends unexpectedly return from England: Alun Weaver, now a celebrated man of Welsh letters, and his entrancing wife, Rhiannon.

Master storyteller and satirist Kurt Vonnegut was one of the most in-demand commencement speakers of his time. For each occasion, Vonnegut’s words were unfailingly unique, insightful, and witty, and they stayed with audience members long after graduation. As edited by Dan Wakefield, this book reads like a narrative in the unique voice that made Vonnegut a hero to readers and listeners of all ages. At times hilarious, razor-sharp, freewheeling, and deeply serious, these reflections are ideal for anyone undergoing what Vonnegut would call their "long-delayed puberty ceremony".