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  Utopia PR

  Adam Bender

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  IndieReader Discovery Awards 2021 Winner for Humor 
  Utopia PR is a sci-fi satire about seeking work-life balance while doing public relations for an authoritarian president. 
  PR extraordinaire Blake Hamner (the n is silent) put off his honeymoon for his big break: joining a major political campaign for president. Now, the "Hammer" struggles to make time for his marriage as Crisis Communications Manager for Our Leader, who since taking power has become increasingly mad and totalitarian. 
  The Hammer starts to reconsider his career choices when one of Our Leader's savage steel hounds attacks the Comms team at a press conference. He'd love to talk about his erratic job with his wife, Triple-N news anchor Maria Worthington, but they have a rule: the broadcast journalist doesn't ask Blake for inside information about his work, and the spin doctor doesn't use their relationship as leverage on what Maria reports. They say you shouldn't keep things from each other in a marriage, but it's OK—the only secrets between Blake and Maria are professional. 
  When a revolutionary levels grave allegations against Our Leader—and accuses Blake of distributing disinformation and propaganda to cover it up—the PR rep who thought he could talk his way out of any crisis finds himself utterly trapped in a dystopian job. 
  "In a tale that’s reminiscent of political farces such as the HBO TV series Veep, Bender employs a smooth, amusing, and straightforward prose style that’s briskly paced," says Kirkus Reviews. "Its tone is irreverent, and readers looking for a quick chuckle will likely enjoy Bender’s winking comedy, which is punctuated with genuinely sweet, sincere moments." 
  "Sharp and witty, the novel Utopia PR is a free range political send-up set in a chaotic, perplexing, and familiar future world," says Foreword Reviews (Clarion).

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  Suburgatory - Twisted Tales from...

  Linda Erin Keenan

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  Suburgatory lampoons the absurdities and contradictions that Linda Erin Keenan has witnessed since leaving New York City, where she was a thoroughly urban CNN news producer for seven years, and settling down as a hapless stay-at-home suburban mother. The original proposal for this book was picked by Warner Brothers in 2010, and you can see their imagining of Suburgatory on the ABC show of the same name.Keenan was forced by the man in her life to leave her beloved New York City for a supposed suburban utopia. Instead she found herself trapped in a place where conformity is king and where she often felt like she had been taken hostage by an adult Girl Scout troop. So Keenan decided to train her twisted reporter's eye on the strange inhabitants of this new foreign land. Thought of as a local town newspaper or Web site, Suburgatory includes "news stories" (Mom Plans School Auction During Dreary Sex) that go after the tiger moms, breastfeeding nazis, frustrated swingers, crypto-racists, barely-there dads, and power-mad principals.In addition to the irreverent news stories, Suburgatory features faux op-ed "Shout Outs" (Let's Do that Key Party Right the Next Time), witty advertisements (Briarcliff Academy-Educating the Stupid Rich Since 1903), and an over-the-top totally toxic advice columnist: Dr. Drama.

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  Ward No 6

  Anton Chekhov

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  The line between sanity and insanity is blurred in this classic novella by Anton Chekhov.  The disillusioned idealist Dr. Rabin is in charge of a provincial lunatic asylum, overseeing with weary, dubious policies a motley group of patients, a group that mirrors in microcosm all of human and especially Russian society.  Seeking answers to profound questions, Dr. Rabin enters into dialogues with both staff members and patients, trying to make sense out of what has become of his life, until it becomes less and less clear who is the doctor and who is the patient.  Written with obvious reformist concerns about the dehumanization of "lunatics," the story is also a harrowing parable about the meaning of human existence. Summary by Expatriate.

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  OK Boomer - And Other...

  Lisa Beth Johnson, Phoebe Bottoms

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  Jokes for (and about) every generation, from boomers to zoomers.   Past, Present, and Future walk into a bar…and then things get tense. Fortunately, nothing can defuse tension like humor, and this book is packed with age (in)appropriate jokes for every generational stereotype.   The old have been complaining about the young—and vice versa—for centuries. Whether you need a zinger for your cranky grandfather, a one-liner for your out-of-touch aunt, or a snarky comeback for a clueless millennial, OK, Boomer has it all. Enjoy . . .   Jokes (How many boomers does it take to change a light bulb? Three: one to do it, and another two to talk about how much better the old one was) Riddles (Q: Why do boomers always pay with an exact amount? A: Because they’re afraid of change) Boomer Band/Millennial Mash-ups (James Taylor Swift, Fleetwood Macklemore, Steve Miller Band of Horses) Lists (Things that Still Exist Only Because of Boomers)

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  Death Wore Gloves

  Ross H. Spencer

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  A Chicago PI faces a deadly world of femme fatales and not-so-saintly nuns in this crime novel from a “wild, shrewd, mad, and unexpectedly funny” author (The New York Times).   When Sister Rosetta’s niece goes missing, the nun (whose favorite poison is anything bottle-bound and boozy) hires shifty PI Tut Willow to find dear Gladys. But as Tut pulls back the curtain on Gladys’ checkered past—which includes a few racy pictures that’d make a sailor blush—he also discovers that someone doesn’t want her found. And soon bodies start piling up. Is Sister Rosetta behind the deaths of those out to harm her niece . . . or are Tut and Gladys just pawns in a much darker game?   Full of laugh-out-loud comedy and the darkest of intrigue, Death Wore Gloves is “a lively story, both in and out of bed” from an author with “a keen sense of humor and a sharp writing style . . . Top of the line, this one is” (The New York Times).   “This book could have played well at Minsky’s.” —Publishers Weekly   “There is something of Donald E. Westlake in Mr. Spencer’s makeup. Like Mr. Westlake, he revels in absurdities that perhaps turn out to be not so absurd after all.” —The New York Times

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  Buried Alive

  Arnold Bennett

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  Buried Alive (1908) is a witty satire by Arnold Bennett about a shy painter.  Excerpt from the book:  "The peculiar angle of the earth's axis to the plane of the ecliptic—that angle which is chiefly responsible for our geography and therefore for our history—had caused the phenomenon known in London as summer. The whizzing globe happened to have turned its most civilized face away from the sun, thus producing night in Selwood Terrace, South Kensington. No. 91 was one of about ten thousand similar houses between South Kensington Station and North End Road. With its grimy stucco front, its cellar kitchen, its hundred stairs and steps, its perfect inconvenience, and its conscience heavy with the doing to death of sundry general servants, it uplifted tin chimney-cowls to heaven and gloomily awaited the day of judgment for London houses, sublimely ignoring the axial and orbital velocities of the earth. You felt that No. 91 was unhappy."

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