Showing results by publisher "Penguin Audio" in Satire

Imagine a world where everyone knows everything about everybody. Where what a person "feels" and "truly believes" is protected under the law, while what is rational, even provable is condemned as heresy. A world where to question ignorance and intolerance is to commit a Crime against Faith. Imagine it. Or just wait until After the Flood.

Alvie Knightly may be waking up in the Ritz, but her life is no bed of roses. Firstly, she has the mother of all hangovers. Secondly, her beautiful, spoiled twin sister, Beth, has just been found dead in Sicily - and the police want Alvie for questioning. And thirdly, Alvie's hot new boyfriend has vanished with every penny of the millions they stole from Beth. But he picked the wrong girl to mess with.

In Why We Suck, Dr. Denis Leary uses his common sense, and his biting and hilarious take on the world, to attack the politically correct, the hypocritical, the obese, the thin - basically everyone who takes themselves too seriously. He does so with the extra oomph of a doctorate bestowed upon him by his alma mater Emerson College. "Sure it's just a celebrity type of thing - they only gave it to me because I'm famous." Leary explains.

Tiller is an average American college student with a good heart but minimal aspirations. Pong Lou is a larger-than-life, wildly creative Chinese American entrepreneur who sees something intriguing in Tiller beyond his bored exterior and takes him under his wing. When Pong brings him along on a boisterous trip across Asia, Tiller is catapulted from ordinary young man to talented protégé, and pulled into a series of ever more extreme and eye-opening experiences that transform his view of the world, of Pong, and of himself.

Meet Ingrid. She works on a gargantuan luxury cruise liner, where she spends her days reorganising the merchandise and waiting for long-term guests to drop dead in the changing rooms. On her days off, she disembarks from the ship and gets blind drunk on whatever the local alcohol is. It's not a bad life. And it distracts her from thinking about the other life she left behind five years ago. Until one day, she is selected for the employee mentorship scheme.

Years after the events of The House of God, the Fat Man has been given leadership over a new Future of Medicine Clinic at what is now only Man's 4th Best Hospital, and has persuaded Dr. Roy Basch and some of his intern cohorts to join him to teach a new generation of interns and residents. In a medical landscape dominated by computer screens and corrupted by money, they have one goal: to make medicine humane again.

Years after escaping her unbearable artworld friends in New York for a new life in London, an unnamed writer finds herself back on the Lower East Side attending a dinner party hosted by Eugene and Nicole – an artist-curator couple – and attended by their pretentious circle. It’s the evening after the funeral of their mutual friend, a failed actress, and if the narrator once loved and admired Eugene and Nicole and their important friends, she now despises them all.

Having fled Japanese-occupied Korea for the gleaming promise of the United States with nothing but four dollars and a suitcase full of Shakespeare to his name, the young, idealistic Chungpa Han arrives in a New York teeming with expatriates, businessmen, students, scholars, and indigents. Struggling to support his studies, he becomes a traveling salesman, a domestic worker, and a farmer, and observing along the way the idealism, greed, and shifting values of the industrializing 20th century. East Goes West casts a sharply satirical eye on the demands and perils of assimilation.

After a devastating break-up with her fiancé, Geraldine is struggling to get her life back on track in Toronto. Her two old friends, Sunny and Rachel, left ages ago for New York, where they've landed good jobs, handsome husbands, and unfairly glamorous lives (or at least so it appears to Geraldine). Sick of watching from the sidelines, Geraldine decides to force the universe to give her the big break she knows she deserves, and moves to New York City. As she zigzags her way through the downtown art scene and rooftop party circuit, she discovers how hard it is to find her footing.

Republican congressman Alexander Paine Wilson is determined that nothing will stop him in his campaign for re-election. Not the fact that he is a bachelor, not the fact that his main adversary Nancy Beavers - married, with children - is rising in the polls. Nothing. That is, until one hot day in August, he receives a large parcel via FedEx. Inside is a gigantic taxidermied aardvark.

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.

Tina is a good person. Tina has done something bad. But she did the wrong thing for the right reasons, and that makes it a bit less bad - doesn't it? For six years Tina has served drinks and collected dry-cleaning for a boss who spends more on lunch than Tina does on rent, and her debts are piling up. Then a blip in the expenses system offers her the opportunity to change her life: a big fat cheque that shouldn't have Tina's name on it. And her moral compass temporarily malfunctions.

What do we believe? And in God's name why? Lewis Black has the answers. Or at least his answers. He survived Hebrew school and a bar mitzvah (barely), was a 60's college student who saw the parallels between religious rapture and drug-induced visions (even if none of his friends did), explored the self-actualization movement of the 70's (and the self-indulgence it engendered), and turned a cynical eye toward politicians who don the cloak of religious rectitude to cover up their own hypocrisy.

While filming on location in Belfast, Northern Ireland, John Doe, the universally adored host of the culinary travel show Last Call, is found dead in a hotel room in an apparent suicide. As the news of his untimely demise breaks stateside, a group of friends, fixers, hustlers, and opportunists vie to seize control of the narrative: Doe’s chess-master of an agent Nia, ready to call in every favor she is owed to preserve his legacy; down-on-her-luck journalist Katie, who fabricates a story about Doe to save her job at a failing website.

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. Claire is surprised to discover that she is smitten with her new employers, a welcoming clique of wellness addicts with impossibly shiny hair, who whirl from juice cleanse to overpriced miracle vitamins to spin class with limitless energy.

Ellen is tired of being overshadowed at work. Tired of watching less competent, entitled suits take the promotions she’s earned. But when one of them pushes her too far, things take a murderous turn. And it turns out the darker Ellen goes, the shinier her future starts to look. Business can be murder, but it turns out murder can also be good business for Ellen.

The new book by the best-selling authors of Plato and a Platypus Walk Into a Bar is a hilarious take on the philosophy, theology, and psychology of mortality and immortality. That is, Death. The authors pry open the coffin lid on this one, looking at the Big D and also its prequel, Life, and its sequel, the Hereafter.

The Infinite Future is a mind-bending novel that melds two addictive tales in one. In the first, we meet three broken people, joined by an obsession with a forgotten Brazilian science-fiction author named Salgado-MacKenzie. The motley trio sets off to discover his identity, and find his fabled masterpiece. In the second half, Wirkus gives us the lost masterpiece itself - the actual text of The Infinite Future, Salgado-MacKenzie's wonderfully weird magnum opus.

Thucydides, Gibbon, Tuchman, McCullough: to the names of the world's great historians must now be added the name of Dave Barry, who has taken a long, hard look at our new millennium (so far) and, when he stopped hyperventilating, has written it all down, because nobody would believe it otherwise.

In near-future America, film critic Noah Body uploads his reviews to a content aggregator. His job is routine: watch, seethe, pan. He dreams of making his own film, free from the hackery of commercial cinema. Faced with writing about lousy movies for a website that no one reads, Noah smuggles into his work episodes from his trainwreck of a life. We learn that his apartment in Miniature Aleppo has been stripped of furniture after his wife ran off with his best friend - who Noah believes has possessed his body.