検索キーワード： 制作 "Audible Studios" ユーモア・風刺文学・フィクション

Outlandish and emotional, this humorous novel centers on Sheldon Funk, a struggling actor who dies in a bus restroom only to awaken during his autopsy and attack the coroner. Fleeing into the wintry streets of Toronto, Sheldon realizes he’s now a zombie - as if he didn’t have enough on his plate already. His last audition, reading for the reality television series House Bingo, had gone disastrously wrong. His mother is in the late stages of dementia, his savings are depleted, his agent couldn’t care less, and his boyfriend is little more than a set of nice abs.

Lieutenant Mike Galway takes command of his first platoon, and it is not at all what he bargained for. What he anticipated was the challenge of training a unit of disciplined Marine infantrymen to go to war. Instead he finds himself responsible for a group of unruly American teenagers, for whom he has to become a combination of surrogate father, psychologist, high school principal, marriage counselor, financial advisor, conflict mediator, and drug and alcohol therapist.

Inez Victor knows that the major casualty of the political life is memory. But the people around Inez have made careers out of losing track. Her senator husband wants to forget the failure of his last bid for the presidency. Her husband's handler would like the press to forget that Inez's father is a murderer. And, in 1975, the year in which much of this bitterly funny novel is set, America is doing its best to lose track of its one-time client, the lethally hemorrhaging republic of South Vietnam.

New York City is on high alert: a gasoline truck is stuck in the Midtown tunnel and the driver has fled. Through panic and gridlock, Alex and Ruth must transport their beloved old dachshund, whose back legs are suddenly paralyzed, to the animal hospital, using a cutting board as a stretcher. But this is also the weekend when Alex and Ruth must sell the apartment in which they have lived for most of their adult lives.

This charmingly inventive, deliciously improbable seriocomic novel opens at 11 o’clock, on the morning of July 14, in the year 2000, on the Avenue d’Angleterre in Beirut. Private George Smith of the American Peace-Keeping Forces in Lebanon is breathlessly chasing a hand grenade - which he threw in the line of duty - down the street. It seems he forgot to pull the pin. At that very moment, one Heloise Svejk is crossing the street from east to west, bearing an empty coffin on her shoulder. From this unlikely encounter is born one of the great love stories of the first year of the 21st century, not completely unworthy of that of Heloise’s namesake.

Freda, a struggling mortician in working-class Rome, only married her repulsive ventriloquist husband, Alberto, because it was prophesied that she'd do so. Now that he's vanished mysteriously along with his equally abhorrent dummy (who Freda suspects is actually a midget), she'd like them both to stay missing - though she's devastated by the simultaneous disappearance of her soul mate, Pierino, her beloved talking parrot.

Katie Johnson may make her living consulting with new moms on the latest, greatest baby gadgets no parent should be without, or which mommy meet-ups are the most socially desirable, or whether melon truly is the new black, but the success of her marriage to her husband, Alex, depends on controlling her own urges toward motherhood. He's adamant that they stay childless. Sure, Katie understands that he's upset over the fact that his out-of-town ex-wife rarely lets him see their 10-year-old son, Peter. But living vicariously through her anxious clients and her twin sisters' precocious children only makes Katie resent his stance more deeply.

It has been 20 years since The War, and Major John Karnage has finally settled into retirement: locked up in an insane asylum, with an explosive device embedded in the back of his neck to curb his violent tendencies. Karnage and his troopers have been deemed unfit to live in normal society. Like a bit of old chewing gum stuck under a coffee table, the world has left The War and its scarred, unstable veterans behind.

Leigh Tiller has just been kidnapped. The beautiful, ineffably cool New York socialite is being held by a group of mentally ill terrorists who've demanded millions in ransom from Leigh's wealthy father. There's just one problem: Kip Tiller doesn't want Leigh back. He wants her dead. And he's hired The Serologist - a psychotic, patchwork-scarred hit man - to make sure it happens. Leigh's unlikely savior is Laser Mechanic, the coolly brilliant leader of the guerrilla art collective, Strategic Art Defence.

Determined to thwart her parents' plans to marry her off into Asian suburbia, Fiona seeks her freedom at any price. How far will she go to bury the Hello Kitty stereotype forever? Fiona's journey of self-discovery is biting and clever as she embraces her true nature and creates her own version of the American Dream, eliminating - without fear or remorse - anyone who stands in her way.

When Sy Levin, a high school teacher beset by alcohol and bad decisions, leaves the city for the Pacific Northwest to start over, it's no surprise that he conjures a vision of the extraordinary new life awaiting him there: "He imagined the pioneers in covered wagons entering this valley for the first time. Although he had lived little in nature Levin had always loved it, and the sense of having done the right thing in leaving New York was renewed in him."

A Modest Proposal for Preventing the Children of Poor People in Ireland From Being a Burden to Their Parents or Country, and for Making Them Beneficial to the Public, commonly referred to as A Modest Proposal, is a Juvenalian satirical essay written and published anonymously by Jonathan Swift in 1729. Swift suggests in his essay that the impoverished Irish might ease their economic troubles by selling children as food. By doing this he mocks the authority of the British officials.

A hilarious novel set amid the Merchant Marine Academy. Commodore Dickey, the pompous second in command at the United States Merchant Marine Academy, desperately wants the top job, presently occupied by the skirt chasing Admiral Johnson. Dickey goes into cahoots with Mogie Mogelefsky, the imperious, bullying mayor of neighboring Great Neck to oust Johnson. When they succeed in exposing him in yet another peccadillo, Mogie suddenly reneges on their deal.

An all-Jewish basketball team barnstorms across Depression-era America, confronting prejudice and point-shaving in this “some-times agonizing, frequently hilarious” novel (Chicago Tribune) by “the game’s foremost chronicler” (Wall Street Journal).

Downward Dog tells the tale of a handsome Bad Boy who becomes a yoga instructor while trying to redeem his womanizing ways and win the forgiveness of the only woman he’s ever really loved. Down on his luck, thanks to a failed nightlife venture, our hero’s stuck with massive debt and broken dreams. His only safe haven is the yoga world, and when his well-connected best buddy launches his yoga career among New York City's elite, our working-class hero becomes a guru to society’s top one percent, a wolf let loose amongst a flock of comely sheep.

Young Noah Adler, passionate, ruthlessly idealistic, is the prodigal son of Montreal’s Jewish ghetto. Finding tradition in league with self-delusion, he attempts to shatter the ghetto’s illusory walls by entering the foreign territory of the goyim. But here, freedom and self-determination continue to elude him. Eventually, Noah comes to recognize "justice and safety and a kind of felicity" in a world he cannot - entirely - leave behind. Richler’s superb account of Noah’s struggle to scale the walls of the ghetto overflows with rich comic satire.

Jackie has a map of the city on the wall of her bedroom, with a green pin for each of her trees. She has a first-kiss tree and a broken-arm tree. She has a car-accident tree. There is a tree at the hospital where Jackie’s mother passed away into the long good night. When one of them gets cut down, Jackie doesn't know what to do but she doesn't let that stop her. She picks up the biggest rock she can carry and puts it through the window of a car. Smash. She intends to leave before the police arrive, but they're early.

In this short story from his Side Effects collection, Woody Allen writes the obituary of eccentric professor Sandor Needleman, a peripatetic Ivy League academic with a penchant for a particular brand of tuna fish.

A goldfish named Ian is falling from the 27th-floor balcony on which his fishbowl sits. He's longed for adventure, so when the opportunity arises, he escapes from his bowl, clears the balcony railing and finds himself airborne. Plummeting toward the street below, Ian witnesses the lives of the Seville on Roxy residents.

Shandee finds a friendly arm at a granite quarry. Ned drops down a hole in a golf course. Luna meets a man made of light bulbs at a tanning parlor. So begins Nicholson Baker's fuse-blowing, sex-positive escapade, House of Holes. Baker returns to erotic territory with a gleefully over-the-top novel set in a pleasure resort, where normal rules don't apply. Brimful of good-nature, wit, and surreal sexual vocabulary, this is a modern-day Hieronymous Boschian bacchanal that is sure to surprise, amuse, and arouse.