Dark Humour Satire

A twisted tale of murder in the world of big-stakes bass fishing tournaments. Filled with ex-wives, evangelists, and an armed pit-bull, this is a story that could only be concocted by Carl Hiaasen, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, New York Times best-selling author, and czar of Florida noir fiction.

The daughter of a narcissistic film star and a billionaire, Madison is abandoned at her Swiss boarding school over Christmas, while her parents are off touting their new projects and adopting more orphans. She dies over the holiday of a mari­juana overdose - and the next thing she knows, she’s in Hell.

Tender Branson - last surviving member of the so-called "Creedish Death Cult" - is dictating his incredible life story into the flight recorder of Flight 2039, cruising on autopilot at 39,000 feet somewhere over the Pacific Ocean. He is all alone in the plane, which will shortly reach terminal velocity and crash into the vast Australian outback.

The centre of the world: 1990s Manhattan. Victor Ward, a model with perfect abs and all the right friends, is seen and photographed everywhere, even in places he hasn’t been and with people he doesn’t know. On the eve of opening the trendiest nightclub in New York history, he’s living with one beautiful model and having an affair with another. Now it’s time to move to the next stage. But the future he gets is not the one he had in mind.

In this darkly comic novel, a group of women inhabits a world of constant surveillance, where informants lurk in the flower beds and false reports fly. Conspiracies abound in a community that normalizes paranoia and suspicion. Some try to flee - whether to a mysterious gambling bordello or to ancestral homes that can be reached only underground through muddy caves, sewers, and tunnels. Others seek out the refuge of Nest County, where traditional Chinese herbal medicines can reshape or psychologically transport the self. Each life is circumscribed by secrets and transcendent delusions.

A smash-hit reality show is offering a lifetime of luxury to the one person living the world's worst life, and now everyone is out to prove just how bad they've got it. Want in? All you've got to do is accept ocular implants that let the whole world see life through your eyes, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Fortunately, there's still one person who hasn't lost faith in all humanity. The show's ever-smiling host is determined to wring some tiny bit of meaning out of this twisted competition and your unhappy existence.

H.H. Munro (Saki) is one of the undisputed masters of the short story. In this complete compendium, the full gamut of his subjects and themes is experienced. His stories are imbued with humorous satire, biting irony, and often the macabre, all of which have one target: the stupidities and hypocrisies of Edwardian upper-class society.

Michael Beard is a Nobel prize-winning physicist whose best work is behind him. Trading on his reputation, he speaks for enormous fees, lends his name to the letterheads of renowned scientific institutions and half-heartedly heads a government-backed initiative tackling global warming. A compulsive womaniser, Beard finds his fifth marriage floundering. But this time it is different: she is having the affair, and he is still in love with her.

Haunted by Chuck Palahniuk is a novel made up of stories: 23 of them, to be precise. Twenty-three of the most horrifying, hilarious, mind-blowing, stomach-churning tales you'll ever encounter, sometimes all at once. They are told by people who have answered an ad headlined "Writers' Retreat: Abandon Your Life for Three Months", and who are led to believe that here they will leave behind all the distractions of "real life" that are keeping them from creating the masterpiece that is in them.

Ex-reporter Joe Winder had been working in the public relations department of a sleazy family entertainment park, The Amazing Kingdom of Thrills, when he chanced upon a news-breaking story inspired by the disappearance of two blue-tongued voles and the bizarre death of Orky, the killer whale.

Victor Alderheim has a lot to answer for. Not only has he heartlessly tricked his young ex-wife, Jenny, out of her art gallery inheritance, but he has also abandoned his son, Kevin, to die in the middle of the Kenyan savanna. It doesn’t occur to Victor that Kevin might be rescued and adopted by a Maasai medicine man, or that he might be expected to undergo the rituals expected of all new Maasai warriors - which have him running back to Stockholm as fast as you can say circumcision without anaesthetic.

Many view "hitting rock bottom" as a foundation on which to rebuild one's life, a place from which one can only ascend. Gamers know to search for a secret door leading down to the sewer.

More preoccupied with drinking, sleeping, and writing, an unnamed student neglects his studies and invents three separate openings for a novel. The first introduces the Pooka MacPhellimey, "a member of the devil class", the second involves Mr. John Furriskey, a character belonging to another of the student's creations (writer Dermot Trellis), while the final opening features legendary Irish heroes Finn Mac Cool and Mad King Sweeny. Soon, Trellis' creations rebel against him, doing as they like while he sleeps, and the characters begin wandering in and out of each other's tales.

When 34-year-old Ms Shibata gets a new job in Tokyo to escape sexual harassment at her old one, she finds that, as the only woman at her new workplace—a company that manufactures cardboard tubes—she is expected to do all the menial tasks. One day, she announces that she can't clear away her colleagues' dirty cups—because she's pregnant and the smell nauseates her. The only thing is...Ms Shibata is not pregnant.

Still bruised and heartbroken from their last calamitous quest, Gorm Ingerson and his band of washed-up heroes try to make amends for the orcs they accidentally betrayed. But justice is put on hold when an old foe marches to the city gates. Gorm is horrified to discover a liche pitching the frightened city-dwellers on the merits of the undead lifestyle...at the head of a corpse army. To save the city from high-pressure sales tactics and an inevitable siege, the dwarf warrior and his misfit band hatch a harebrained scheme that lands them at the top of the king’s kill list.

Twenty-six-year-old editorial assistant Nella Rogers is tired of being the only Black employee at Wagner Books. Fed up with the isolation and the micro-aggressions, she’s thrilled when Hazel starts working in the cubicle beside hers. They’ve only just started comparing natural hair care regimens, though, when a string of uncomfortable events cause Nella to become Public Enemy Number One and Hazel, the Office Darling. Then the notes begin to appear on Nella’s desk: Leave Wagner. Now.

Pregnant and secretly married, Cheryl Anway scribbles what becomes her last will and testament on a school binder shortly before a rampaging trio of misfit classmates gun her down in a high school cafeteria. For a handful of people still reeling from that horrific day, life remains derailed.

She’s a fashion model who has everything: a boyfriend, a career, a loyal best friend. But when a sudden freeway "accident" leaves her disfigured and incapable of speech, she goes from being the beautiful center of attention to being an invisible monster, so hideous that no one will acknowledge she exists. Enter Brandy Alexander, Queen Supreme, one operation away from becoming a real woman, who will teach her that reinventing yourself means erasing your past and making up something better. And that salvation hides in the last places you’ll ever want to look.

A Mosca, in un afoso pomeriggio di primavera, due letterati stanno elencando le prove dell'inesistenza di Dio. Lo straniero che si intromette nella discussione è di tutt'altro parere. Non solo, ma è stato presente al processo di Gesù. Si tratta infatti del Diavolo, nei panni del mago Woland, e la sua spettacolare comparsa getterà nel caos il burocratismo sovietico e l'élite letteraria del tempo. Satira devastante e fantastica, il romanzo, in parte ambientato nella capitale sovietica e in parte nell'antica Gerusalemme, è uno dei massimi capolavori della letteratura.

I played all those cool video games. I watched all those movies. I even read the books. In most of 'em, the hero shoots the bad guys, drives a sweet car, never gets hungry, and always seems to get laid by the end. Yeah. Whatever. I gotta be straight with you about why I wrote this journal, and it comes down to one thing, the apocalypse kinda sucks. It doesn’t meet my expectations at all.