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

It’s a beautiful day in Newport, Rhode Island, when Phoebe Stone arrives at the grand Cornwall Inn wearing a green dress and gold heels, not a bag in sight, alone. She's immediately mistaken by everyone in the lobby for one of the wedding people, but she’s actually the only guest at the Cornwall who isn’t here for the big event. Phoebe is here because she’s dreamed of coming for years—she hoped to shuck oysters and take sunset sails with her husband, only now she’s here without him, at rock bottom, and determined to have one last decadent splurge on herself.

John Dies at the End is a genre-bending, humorous account of two college drop-outs inadvertently charged with saving their small town—and the world—from a host of supernatural and paranormal invasions.

Honestly, what amazes me the most with a lot of the people I meet is that they think they’re so big. They think, ultimately, that the universe revolves around them. And I’m beginning to think that it’s only when you live a life like mine - it’s only when you’re in a position where you don’t even really own yourself, when you can’t even really say that you’re a citizen of any particular country - that you realize that we’re all just tiny pieces of cosmic dust floating through the void until we disappear forever and we’re never heard from again.

Elsie Mabel Fitzpatrick is eighty-one years old. She's lived on her idyllic street, Kenny Lane, for sixty years--longer than anyone else. Aside from being a curmudgeon who minds everyone else's business, few would suspect that Elsie has a past that she has worked exceedingly hard at concealing. Because when it comes to murder, no one ever suspects little girls or old ladies. And Elsie Mabel Fitzpatrick, once a little girl and now an old lady, has a strange history of people in her life coming to a foul end.

Elsie Bovary is a cow, and a pretty happy one at that—her long, lazy days are spent eating, napping, and chatting with her best friend, Mallory. One night, Elsie and Mallory sneak out of their pasture; but while Mallory is interested in flirting with the neighboring bulls, Elsie finds herself drawn to the farmhouse. Through the window, she sees the farmer's family gathered around a bright Box God—and what the Box God reveals about something called an "industrial meat farm" shakes Elsie's understanding of her world to its core.

This program is read by the author. Blythe Roberson’s sharp observational humor is met by her openhearted willingness to revel in the ugliest warts and shimmering highs of choosing to live our lives amongst other humans. She collects her crushes like ill-cared-for pets, skewers her own suspect decisions, and assures listeners that any date you can mess up, she can top tenfold. And really, was that date even a date in the first place?

Life hasn’t been easy for Finlay Donovan lately, but it just got a whole lot harder. Her nanny and partner-in-crime, Vero, has been extradited from Virginia to Maryland, where she’s facing criminal charges for a theft she swears she didn’t commit. A prisoner to an ankle bracelet as she awaits her trial, Vero is forced to live with her overbearing mother and nosy aunt. Threatening messages keep arriving on her mother’s door, demanding Vero “turn over the money . . . or else.”

A biting satire about a young man's isolated upbringing and the race trial that sends him to the Supreme Court, Paul Beatty's The Sellout showcases a comic genius at the top of his game. It challenges the sacred tenets of the United States Constitution, urban life, the civil rights movement, the father-son relationship, and the holy grail of racial equality—the black Chinese restaurant.

An insanely competitive housing market. A desperate buyer on the edge. In Marisa Kashino’s darkly hilarious debut novel, Best Offer Wins, the white picket fence becomes the ultimate symbol of success—and obsession. How far would you go for the house of your dreams?

Within the quiet walls of the Appleseed Rectory, a gorgeous five-bedroom, three-story home in rural England, anything goes: the drugs are consumed with gusto, the booze flows like water, and the sex is near constant and deliciously debauched. When six uppity twenty-somethings gather at the rectory for a careless weekend away, things quickly go awry. And when someone named Johnny begins leaving threatening letters around the house, the group is thoroughly shaken—no one has any clue who this “Johnny” could be.

Charles Highway, a bright, egotistical Oxford student and soon-to-be Great Novelist, spends the eve of his twentieth birthday reflecting on his adolescence—at times stimulating, often embarrassing, and never nearly as debauched as he’d have liked. Until he meets Rachel Noyes, an elusive, unattainable, manic pixie mystery of a girl whom Charles quickly becomes entranced by. He meticulously draws up battle plans and strategies for how to seduce Rachel, and thus the “Rachel Papers” are born.

Richard Tull, a failed and disillusioned novelist, seethes with envy as he watches his longtime friend Gwyn Barry, a talentless, populist charlatan, rise to literary superstardom. Barry is adored by readers, celebrated by critics, and constantly in the public eye, while Tull sinks deeper into middle-aged obscurity, unable to escape the evidence of his own defeat. In a trance of impotent rage, Tull devises a vicious plan to ruin his friend—or at least hurt him as badly as possible—and finds himself tumbling into London’s criminal underworld, as well as the darkest precincts of his own soul.

Foster brothers Terence Service and Gregory Riding could not be more different from one another—Terry “a quivering condom of neurosis and ineptitude” and Greg a “bundle of contempt, vanity and stock-response.” After the shocking killing of Terry’s child sister, he is taken in by the aristocratic and wealthy Riding family and introduced to his new foster brother and sister, Greg and Ursula. As adults, the two boys unhappily share a tiny apartment in London.

Money is everything. Especially to John Self, a successful commercial director from London. He spends his days steeped in booze and pornography and prostitutes, lost in the hedonistic lifestyle of his peers. But John has bigger dreams, and he sets off for America on the invitation of the filmmaker Fielding Goodney in the hope of getting his first feature film, titled Good Money, off the ground. It is in America where John must contend with his degenerative proclivities, or risk the life he’s built.

James Bascule is adrift. College beckons—but not quite strongly enough to actually get him to campus. A trip to Europe showed him a world bigger than his Northern California upbringing—and yet, one broken heart later, Northern California is where he’s returned. Back to his old bedroom, paying his bemused parents rent with his new hobby, baking bread with the sourdough starter that is his only souvenir of what was apparently just a summer fling.

Christmas in Caerphilly is wonderful! Unless you’re a Canadian whose inconsiderate boss is forcing you to spend the holiday there, far from family and friends, with only a slim chance of a white Christmas. Meg already has her hands full, trying to make the season festive for the dozen programmers who are staying with her and Michael while working on a rush project with her brother’s software company. At least it’s an interesting project, since the Canadian company is doing forensic genealogy and DNA analysis. But when the boss is found murdered, there are too many suspects.

Between school events and teaching spin classes, Jen finds herself fully immersed in sports mom competitiveness. These parents seem perfectly unassuming, until their kids start to wrestle, and they become raging pubescent monsters. Learning to navigate this new world while fielding calls from the principal because of Max’s newfound misogynistic behavior, Jen steels herself for the indignities of middle-school life—with her loyal spin class attendees and her bossy four-year-old granddaughter giving her the strength she needs to press on.

Kevin, Meg's cyber-savvy nephew who lives in the basement, comes to her with a problem. He's become involved as the techie for a true-crime podcast, one that focuses on Virginia cold cases and unsolved crimes. And he thinks their podcast has hit a nerve with someone...one of the podcast team has had a brush with death that Kevin thinks was an attempted murder, not an accident. Kevin rather sheepishly asks for Meg's help in checking out the people involved in a couple of the cases.

This short story introduces former college football star turned repo man Ruddy McCann, star of W. Bruce Cameron’s new novel The Midnight Plan of the Repo Man, and tells how Ruddy met his best friend Jake, a lazy but lovable basset hound, during a repo gone wrong. Full of laugh-out-loud humor and thrilling adventure, "The Midnight Dog of the Repo Man" is a page-turning, delightful short story.

New mother, aspiring writer, and former shopgirl Leanne has lost her way. As she struggles with both her grief and the haze of motherhood, it also becomes clear that her best friend, the default queen of East Side Los Angeles, Regina Mark, might not actually be a friend at all. As Leanne begins to investigate and undermine Regina, she also strikes up an unexpected friendship with the lauded writer Maxine Hunter.