Showing results by publisher "Fourth Estate" in Comedy & Humour

Florence Grimes is a 31-year-old party girl who always takes the easy way out. After a dismal end to her girlband career, she's living in West London, single, broke and unfulfilled with only her son Dylan to keep her afloat. But then Alfie Risby, the ten-year-old heir to a frozen food empire and Dylan’s school rival, mysteriously vanishes on a class trip, and Dylan becomes a prime suspect.

Jonathan Abernathy is a loser. Unemployed and behind on his student loan repayments, the only thing Abernathy has in abundance is debt. When a secretive government loan forgiveness programme offers him a job he can literally do in his sleep, Abernathy thinks he’s found his big break. Hired as a dream auditor, he finds himself entering the dreams of white-collar workers to flag their anxieties for removal at night so they'll be more productive in the day. If Abernathy can at least appear competent, might he have a chance at a new life?

Eley Williams returns with a subversive and essential collection of short stories exploring the nature of relationships both intimate and transient – from the easy gamesmanship of contagious yawns to the horror of a smile fixed for just a second too long. Whether jostling for attention or ducking to evade it, her characters seek connections not only with each other but also to versions of themselves.

Anna Wiener was beginning to tire of her assistant job in New York publishing. Within a year she had moved to San Francisco to take up a job at a data analytics start-up in Silicon Valley. She had a healthy income for the first time in her life. She felt like part of the future. But a tide was beginning to turn. People were speaking of tech start-ups as surveillance companies. Out of 60 employees, only 8 of her colleagues were women. Casual sexism was rife. Sexual harassment cases were proliferating.

Ambitious and hardworking Tracy Flick feels underappreciated and stuck. Her job as a high school assistant principal isn’t the political career she dreamed of as an over-achieving teen, so when the longtime principal abruptly announces his retirement, offering a rare chance of promotion, Tracy is filled with zeal at the prospect of success. But nothing ever comes easily to Tracy Flick, no matter how diligent or qualified she happens to be.

Cecelia Watson used to be obsessive about grammar rules. But then she began teaching. And that was when she realised that strict rules aren’t always the best way of teaching people how to make words say what they want them to; that they are even, sometimes, best ignored. One punctuation mark encapsulates this thorny issue more clearly than any other. The semicolon. Hated by Stephen King, Hemingway, Vonnegut and Orwell, and loved by Herman Melville, Henry James and Rebecca Solnit, it is the most divisive punctuation mark in the English language, and many are too scared to go near it.

Sylvie is only happy when she is at therapy. This is because Sylvie is in love with her therapist. She wants to kiss her and roll around on the floor with her. She thinks about her every second they’re not together (roughly 167 hours and 10 minutes per week). She’s aware she has an obsession, but whether it is – as her therapist suggests – a case of extreme ‘erotic transference’, or a lost person’s need to connect, Sylvie isn’t sure.

Jonathan Abernathy is a loser. Unemployed, behind on his student loan payments and a self-declared failure, the only thing Abernathy has in abundance is debt. When a government loan forgiveness programme offers Abernathy a job he can literally do in his sleep, he thinks he’s found his big break. He finds himself auditing the dreams of white-collar workers, flagging their anxieties for removal so they'll be more productive. If Abernathy can appear to be competent at this new job, might he have a chance at a new life?