Showing results by publisher "Dreamscape Media, LLC" in Satire

"All I want is to be a success.That's all I ask." Joe fails to sell a single set of the Encyclopedia Britannica in six months. Then he fails to sell a single Electrolux and must eat hundreds of pieces of homemade pie, served up by his would-be customers who feel so sorry for him. Holed up in his trailer, Joe finds an outlet his for frustrations in a series of ingenious sexual fantasies, and at last strikes gold. His brain storm, Lightning Rods, Inc., will take Joe to the very top - and to the very heart of corporate insanity.

This funny, down-to-earth parody of Marie Kondo’s The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up hands listeners the most useful tools for keeping crap clean and organized without all the pressure.

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.

The anti-clutter movement is having a moment. You may have heard about a book - an entire book - written on the topic of tidiness and how magical and life-changing it is to neaten up and throw away your belongings. Yes, you read that correctly. It's time to fight that ridiculousness and to start buying even more stuff and leaving it any place you want.

Lydia Millet's exquisite new novel tells the story of an Arizona man’s relationship with the family next door, whose house has one wall made entirely out of glass. The story delivers attraction and love, friendship and grief. But Millet also evokes the uncanny. Through close observation of human and animal life in the desert, she captures the daunting scale of human society without losing sight of the real difference one person can make in the world. Written with humor and benevolence, Dinosaurs asks big questions: Can a person be good? Can a man be good?

Paul is a recently demoted adjunct instructor of freshman comp, a divorced but doting Brooklyn father, and a self-desc­ribed “curmudgeonly crank” cataloging his resentment of the priorities of modern life in a book called The Luddite Manifesto. Outraged by the authoritarian creeps ruining the country, he is determined to better the future for his young daughter, one aggrieved lecture at a time.

Rejoice! A new messiah has come, and her name is Julie. Born to Murray Katz, the solitary (and celibate) keeper of an abandoned lighthouse on the Jersey shore, our protagonist arrives on Earth boasting supernatural abilities evocative of her divine half-brother, Jesus. As a child, she revels in her talent for walking on water, resurrecting dead crabs, and treating fireflies as luminous alphabet blocks. But after she reaches adolescence, her life becomes as challenging and ambiguous as any mortal’s.

Sit around, leave sh*t all over the place, drink, forget about deadlines...being lazy is pretty easy. But the real art to being chill is when someone without any real ambition can fly under the radar and live unscathed by the never-ending reams of self-help and inspiration rained upon anyone who just wants to watch Netflix. Find that magical place where doing what comes naturally keeps the do-ers at arm's length. Rather than doing less, do just enough.

One of the most popular novels released in the 1920s on the hedonistic Jazz Age, Gentlement Prefer Blondes was declared "the great American novel" by Edith Wharton. Told from the point of view of a blonde flapper named Lorelei in the form of her diary, this novel follows her adventures around the world in search of a gentleman companion who can elevate her position within society. As Lorelei cycles through multiple men, she discovers things about herself and the way that she lives her life in retrospection....

It's the middle of the Great Depression, and Morris Katz and his cousin, Albert, are broke. But that's all about to change when they head off to college on a mission from Morris' mother to find rich, unattractive Jewish girls to marry. The boys arrive on campus armed with a secret weapon: the poetry of Morris' cousin, Crip. Within a day Morris is courting Celeste Zimmerman, the frumpy heir to a movie theater franchise.

As the United States sinks into apocalypse, two people fight to preserve life and sanity. One is Nora Burkhart, a schoolteacher who will stop at nothing to save her son. The other is genius sculptor Gerard Korty, who struggles to create a masterwork that will heal the metaphysical wounds of the age. Highlights include a bloody battle on a New Jersey golf course between Jews and anti-Semites, a debate between Martin Luther and Erasmus, and a chilling villain in the personage of Dr. Adrian Lucido - founder of a new pagan church in Mexico and inventor of a cure worse than any disease.

God's just been in a deep-freeze coma in the Arctic. Strapped for cash, the Vatican has sold the body (a bargain at $1.3 billion!) to Baptists in Florida. Enterprising souls that they are, they’ve turned the Corpus Dei into a popular two-mile-long theme-park attraction at Orlando’s Celestial City USA - hooked up to the largest life-support system on earth. Then things get weird....

Eddie Morales finds his lowly R&D life completely upended when his Boise-based biotech firm dispatches him to Puerto Malogrado, a tiny but tumultuous country in South America where the international media is accusing their experimental potatoes of causing a bizarre medical crisis. Eddie unwillingly arrives in South America only to find his plans for a quick resolution thwarted when he gets caught between the two sides of an impending revolution, each hoping to capitalize on the potato scandal in order to seize power.

Lions, Komodo dragons, dogs, monkeys, and pheasants - all have shared spotlights and tabloid headlines with celebrities such as Sharon Stone, Thomas Edison, and David Hasselhoff. In this critically acclaimed collection, Lydia Millet hilariously tweaks these unholy communions to run a stake through the heart of our fascination with famous people and pop culture.

On his first day of college, farm boy Asa Hearthrug enthusiastically jumps out of bed - and discovers that his pajama pants are caught in the bedsprings. He learns that his dog has died, and his father, in an effort to soften the blow, tells an absurd story about a female bullfighter. Next, the freshman pays a visit to his high school sweetheart to say a heartfelt good-bye, but Lodestone La Toole is more interested in hamburgers than vows of devotion.

Piedra Negra is an isolated village that is home to many soldiers who were injured in the revolution and now pass their time drinking firewater so intense that they all hallucinate and most never recover. The firewater distiller's daughter, Elena, longs to be a poet. After a chance encounter with Daniel Arcilla, Cuba's most important poet, she wins a national poetry prize and leaves Piedra Negra behind for Havana. There, she encounters a population adjusting to a new way of life post-revolution: spies with secret meetings and black marketeers dealing with censorship.