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

Considered one of the best baseball novels of all time, this black comedy about a discontented businessman's obsession with a fantasy baseball league of his own creation is "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty" meets William Gaddis meets John Updike's Rabbit, Run. Somewhere in a "major-league" American city, there lives a man named J. Henry Waugh—no-account accountant, barfly, and country music fan.

A workhouse orphan, Oliver experiences the terror and brutality of the criminal underworld. His companions, a thief, a whore, a pickpocket, and a fence, are destined for gruesome ends, but Oliver emerges unscathed from the darkness of the underworld.

In Prohibition-era America, young George Finch is setting out as an artist - without the encumbrance of a shred of talent. He falls in love with Molly, but Molly's imperious stepmother is having none of it. Poor George doesn't seem to stand a chance.

A man with dark thoughts on his mind is racing along the remote snowy roads of Hurmevaara in Finland when there is flash in the sky and something crashes into the car. That something turns about to be a highly valuable meteorite. With euro signs lighting up the eyes of the locals, the unexpected treasure is temporarily placed in a neighbourhood museum, under the watchful eye of a priest named Joel.

Set during the time of the Napoleonic Wars, this classic gives a satirical picture of a worldly society. The novel revolves around the exploits of the impoverished but beautiful and devious Becky Sharp who craves wealth and a position in society. Calculating and determined to succeed, she charms, deceives and manipulates everyone she meets. A novel of early 19th-century English society, it takes its title from the place designated as the centre of human corruption in John Bunyan's 17th-century allegory.

Psmith and his friend Mike are sent by their fathers to work in the City. But work is the last thing on Psmith's mind; surely there are more interesting things to do with the day than spend it in a bank? Unfortunately the natives aren't conducive to his socialising within work hours, but all's fair in love and work as the monocled Old Etonian, with a little grudging help from Mike, begins to rope in allies in order to reform the bank manager and make him A Decent Member of Society.

Célian Laurent. Manhattan royalty. Notorious playboy. Heir to a media empire...and my new boss. I could have impressed him, if not for last month's unforgettable one-night stand. I left it with more than orgasms and a pleasant memory - namely, his wallet. Now he's staring me down like I'm the dirt under his Italian loafers, and I'm supposed to take it. But the thing about being Judith "Jude" Humphry is I have nothing to lose. Brooklyn girl. Infamously quirky. Heir to a stack of medical bills and a tattered couch.

Hoping to write his book in quiet and seclusion, Horton Smith has returned home to Pilot Knob. Here, in the tiny village where he passed so many carefree childhood years, he is untroubled by the pressures of the big city and can freely answer the call of his muse. Of course, back in the city Horton didn't have to run from dinosaurs. There were no cartoon hillbillies offering him moonshine, Don Quixote was content to confine himself to the pages of a book, and the devil himself was not on Horton's tail.

Eliot Rosewater, a drunk volunteer fireman and president of the fabulously rich Rosewater Foundation, is about to attempt a noble experiment with human nature, with a little help from writer Kilgore Trout. The result is Kurt Vonnegut's funniest satire, an etched-in-acid portrayal of the greed, hypocrisy, and follies of the flesh we are all heir to.

The Journey of Joenes, also published as Journey Beyond Tomorrow, tells the tale of a picaresque journey through an imagined future taken by a naive and innocent man unprepared for the wonders and oddities he encounters. Sheckley examines the present through the distorting lens of a future wonderfully skewed from and yet darkly, hilariously, similar to our own world.

All secret agents need to look out for William Nye, now known as Agent X. His recruitment was simple and his legend is brilliant but un-earned. Somehow, he thinks he's the best there is and we all know how pride goeth before a fall. The master of SF hilarity and biting social satire creates a spy world that has gathered praise from the greats of the genre.

For most people, as they say, money makes the world go 'round. For Rory Honeyman, it's a different story. Having inadvertently and, almost without noticing, invented a new form of cash cow, money makes Rory's world go strangely pear-shaped and out-of-control.

Academy Award winner Dustin Hoffman gives an understated and exemplary performance of this satiric look at the unreality of American media culture. Chance, the enigmatic gardener, becomes Chauncey Gardiner after getting hit by a limo belonging to a Wall Street tycoon. The whirlwind that follows brings Chance to his new status of political policy advisor and possible vice presidential candidate. His garden-variety political responses, inspired by television, become heralded as visionary, and he is soon a media icon.

With cutting wit, fierce conviction, and surprising empathy, Vonnegut explores a diverse range of topics including society, politics, sex, literature, and mortality. Fans who believe they've read all of Vonnegut's work will be delighted to find the author speaking frankly about timely and relevant new topics - with an amusing yet insightful style that's instantly recognizable.

Walter Starbuck, a career humanist and eventual low-level aide in the Nixon White House, is implicated in Watergate and jailed, after which he (like Howard Campbell in Mother Night) works on his memoirs. Starbuck is innocent (his office was used as a base for the Watergate shenanigans of which he had no knowledge), and yet he is not innocent (he has collaborated with power unquestioningly and served societal order all his life). He represents another Vonnegut Everyman caught amongst forces he neither understands nor can defend.

Eugene Debs Hartke describes an odyssey from college professor to prison inmate to prison warden back again to prisoner in another of Vonnegut's bitter satirical explorations of how and where (and why) the American dream begins to die. Employing his characteristic narrative device - a retrospective diary in which the protagonist retraces his life at its end, a desperate and disconnected series of events here in Hocus Pocus show Vonnegut with his mask off and his rhetorical devices unshielded.

Meet Rabo Karabekian, a moderately successful surrealist painter who we meet late in life and see struggling (like all of Vonnegut's key characters) with the dregs of unresolved pain and the consequences of brutality. Loosely based on the legend of Bluebeard (best realized in Bela Bartok's one-act opera), the novel follows Karabekian through the last events in his life that is heavy with women, painting, artistic ambition, artistic fraudulence, and as of yet unknown consequence.

Jenny McLaine está com tudo: trabalha para uma revista feminina descolada, tem uma casa própria e namora um fotógrafo famoso. Só que, embora nas redes sociais sua vida pareça um verdadeiro mar de rosas, a realidade está mais para uma selva caótica em chamas. Isso porque, nos últimos tempos, a legenda ideal, a quantidade certa de emojis em cada comentário e as vidas perfeitas das influenciadoras por quem é obcecada parecem ter dominado seu cotidiano—e o pior é que ela não faz a menor ideia.

On doctor's orders, Bertie Wooster retires to sample the bucolic delights of Maiden Eggesford. But his idyll is rudely shattered by Aunt Dahlia who wants him to nobble a racehorse. Similar blots on Bertie's horizon come in the shape of Major Plank, the African explorer, Vanessa Cook, proud beauty and 'moulder of men', and Orlo Porter, who seems to have nothing else to do but to think of sundering Bertie's head from his body.

How fortunate that Stilton Cheesewright drew Bertie Wooster, the red-hot favourite, in the Drones Club annual darts tournament. Had he not he would surely have beaten Bertie to a pulp and buttered the lawn with him. Stilton does not like men trifling with his fiancée Florence Craye's affections. In the event Florence would seem to prefer Percy Gorringe, stepson of L.G. Trotter.