Showing results by publisher "Macmillan Audio" in Literature & Fiction

After 40 years of making a living using words in every medium, print or electronic, Roy Blount Jr. still can't get over his ABCs. In Alphabet Juice, he celebrates the juju, the sonic and kinetic energies of letters and their combinations. Blount does not prescribe proper English. The franchise he claims is "over the counter" and concentrates more on questions such as these: Did you know that both mammal and matter derive from baby talk? Have you noticed how wince makes you wince?

Konrad Platt needs to get out of town. Heartbroken after his boyfriend leaves him for another man, Konrad abandons his life in London for the warm sun and blue surf of LA. He occupies a refined world of hard abs, VIP parties, and designer drugs that’s constantly, endlessly documented on social media. You know him from your various feeds - sunkissed, gym-ripped, and always having a better time than you. Or is he? North Morgan spins a story in brutal, addictive prose of excess and love that’s like nothing you’ve ever heard.

Nancy Harrison is running for Senate, and she’s going to win, goddamnit. Not that that’s her slogan, although it could be. She’s said all the right things. Passed all the right legislation. Chapped her lips kissing babies. There’s just one problem: her grown children. Greta and Nick Harrison are adrift. Nick is floundering in his attempts to write a musical about the life of Joan Didion (called Hello to All That!). And then there’s his little sister Greta. Smart, pretty, and completely unmotivated, allowing her life to pass her by like the shoppers at the Apple store where she works.

As an assistant publicist in Hollywood, Nicola spends her days (and nights) sweeping up the scandals of singers, movie stars, and TV actors. Fresh from Ohio, she's rapidly discovering the real Hollywood is rotten under its glittering skin. Everyone is a hustler with a hard bottom line and a soap opera sob story. When she breaks her own rules and starts dating a movie star, the Los Angeles scene starts to spill into her own life.

Razor-sharp and hilarious, How to Dodge a Cannonball tells the story of Anders, a white teenager who volunteers to be a Union Army flag-twirler to escape his abusive mother. In desperate acts of self-preservation, he defects—twice—before joining a Black regiment at Gettysburg, claiming to be an octoroon. In his new and entirely incredulous unit, Anders becomes entangled with questionable military men and an arms dealer working for both sides. But more importantly he bonds with the other soldiers, finding friendship and a family he desperately needs.

Bluegrass musician, former journalist and editor, and now PhD in English, Mark Brumfeld has arrived at his 30s with significant debt and no steady prospects. His girlfriend Cassie - a punk bassist in an all-female band, who fled her Midwestern childhood for a new identity - finds work at a “new media” company. When Cassie refuses his marriage proposal, Mark leaves New York and returns to the basement of his childhood home in the Baltimore suburbs.

Olivia Morten is perfect. Maybe she's constantly hungry, but her body is to die for. Maybe her high-flying publicist job has taken over her life, but her clients are LA's hottest celebrities. Maybe her husband is never around, but he is a drop-dead-gorgeous doctor. And maybe her past harbors an incredibly embarrassing secret, but no one remembers high school...right? When Ben Dunn, Olivia's high school archnemesis - and onetime crush - suddenly resurfaces, all of her hard-won perfection begins to unravel.

Recently divorced, 40-something single-mom, Lucy, is lonely, bored, and craving physical connection. So, when her trusted long-time married friend, Nancy, begs Lucy to sleep with her husband to save her marriage, Lucy goes for it. It's such a success, the two friends invent a town-wide underground barter system whereby Nancy's married girlfriends sub-contract Lucy's divorcee friends to sleep with their husbands so they don't have to as often. It's a win, win, win - for a while. Then it all goes to hell in a hand-basket.

At a goblin royal wedding party, a magical food additive turns the humans in the room into horny, six-foot lizards, and all they want to do is have sex. With anything. For as long as they can. And as lizard love isn't something that interests the Sin du Jour staff, something must be done, but the building's magical defenses have kicked in, sealing off access to the outside world.

Before they Go the F**k to Sleep, they need to Shut the F**k Up. If you give a kid a cookie, will he shut the f**k up? That is the question at the heart of this hilarious, deeply honest, profanity-laced book for parents who will do whatever it takes for a moment’s peace.

Agnes Murphy Nash is the perfect Hollywood wife - she has the right friends, the right clothes, and even a side career of her own as a writer. Her husband, Trevor, is a bigshot producer, and from the outside it looks like they’re living a picture-perfect celebrity life. But the job description of a Hollywood wife doesn’t cover divorce, which is the way Agnes’ life is headed after she comes home one day to find her credit cards cancelled and the security passwords to get into her enormous LA home changed.

If there's one thing Joan Dixon knows about herself, it's that she is a damn good journalist. But when she is laid off from yet another soon-to-be-shuttered newspaper, and even the soulless, listicle-writing online jobs have dried up, she is left with few options. Closer to 40 than 30, single, living with her parents again, Joan decides she needs to reinvent herself. She goes to work as a junior copywriter at Bloom, a Los Angeles startup where her bosses are all a decade younger and snacks and cans of fizzy water flow freely.

Joyous, fast and funny, Scott Johnston’s Campusland is a satiric howl at today’s elite educational institutions - from safe spaces to tribal infighting to the sheer sanctimony. A wickedly delightful audiobook that may remind you of Tom Wolfe and David Lodge.

At age 33, Penelope “Pepper” Bradford has no career, no passion, and no children. Her intrusive parents still treat her like a child. Moving into the Chelmsford Arms with her fiancé Rick, an up-and-coming financier, and joining the co-op board give her some control over her life - until her parents take a gut dislike to Rick and urge Pepper to call off the wedding. When, the week before the wedding, she glimpses a trail of desperate text messages from Rick’s obsessed female client, Pepper realizes that her parents might be right.

The Wright family is in ruins. Sue Ellen Wright has what she thinks is a close-to-perfect life. A terrific career as a classics professor, a loving husband, and a son who is just about to safely leave the nest. But then disaster strikes. She learns her husband is cheating and that her son has made a complete mess of his life. So when the opportunity to take her family to a Greek island for a month presents itself, she jumps at the chance.

From the author of the best-selling classics We're Just Like You, Only Prettier and Bless Your Heart, Tramp comes a collection of essays so funny, you'll shoot co'cola out of your nose. You Can't Drink All Day if You Don't Start in the Morning is sure to appeal to anyone who lives south of something.

From the New York Times-bestselling author of Lookaway, Lookaway, Wilton Barnhardt’s Western Alliances is a vivid portrait of a wealthy family set against the backdrop of the 2008 financial crisis. This laugh-out-loud, darkly funny novel follows the Costa family—whose members are every bit as richly absurd as the characters in HBO’s Succession. Part travelogue, part epic family drama, the novel follows Roberto and Rachel across Europe as the two dilettantes come to terms with their father’s choices and the repercussions of his actions.