"This is the story of my life and it's not a happy one. If you wish to read about me you're welcome to but if you're looking for something to give you hope & joy comfort & inspiration then you had best leave off here straightaway and go find something else. My life has an abundance of frustration and pain plus a fair bit of sex and lots of killing and broken bones but it's got precious little hope & joy comfort & inspiration. It's got some women in it too plus a wife. Dalila is the one you may have heard of and a rare piece of work she was. You may think you know the story but believe me there's more."-from The Book of Samson
From the author of the acclaimed and provocative novels Fallen and The Preservationist comes a tale about a man who believes he is touched by the hand of God-then instructed by that God to slaughter his enemies. It is the story of "this worldly existence of men & brutes desire & unkindness" and of the woman, Dalila, who figures at the center of it all. In The Book of Samson, David Maine has created an unforgettable portrait, a unique and astonishing masterpiece that puts a face on a previously faceless icon. "The combination of archaic language and setting with modern sensibilities again demonstrates Maine's talent for making the familiar intriguing."-Publishers Weekly Starred Review"Provocative and beautifully told-a breakout novel for Maine."-Kirkus Starred Review
Tim Dorsey is the internationally best-selling author of the gleefully over-the-top series starring spree-killer Serge Storms. In The Big Bamboo, Serge and sidekick Coleman head out west to take on Hollywood bigwigs and L.A. lowlifes in Dorsey's most outrageous novel yet. Before Tinseltown knows what's hit it, Serge has made an unforgettable foray to the Playboy Mansion and come up against Japanese Yakuza and a host of wacky characters. "Serge and Coleman are an Abbott and Costello for the new millennium as they bumble their way from one ridiculous exploit to the next ."-Booklist
George Hall doesn't understand the modern obsession with talking about everything. 'The secret of contentment, George felt, lay in ignoring many things completely.' Some things in life, however, cannot be ignored.
At fifty-seven, George is settling down to a comfortable retirement, building a shed in his garden, reading historical novels, listening to a bit of light jazz. Then Katie, his tempestuous daughter, announces that she is getting remarried, to Ray. Her family is not pleased - as her brother Jamie observes, Ray has 'strangler's hands'. Katie can't decide if she loves Ray, or loves the wonderful way he has with her son Jacob, and her mother Jean is a bit put out by all the planning and arguing the wedding has occasioned, which get in the way of her quite fulfilling late-life affair with one of her husband's former colleagues. And the tidy and pleasant life Jamie has created crumbles when he fails to invite his lover, Tony, to the dreaded nuptials.
Unnoticed in the uproar, George discovers a sinister lesion on his hip, and quietly begins to lose his mind.
The way these damaged people fall apart - and come together - as a family is the true subject of Mark Haddon's disturbing yet very funny portrait of a dignified man trying to go insane politely.
A BBC Radio 4 full-cast dramatisation starring Michael Hordern as Jeeves and Richard Briers as Wooster. Mayhem has broken out at Brinkley Court... Gussie Fink-Nottle has fallen in love with Madeline Bassett. Angela has argued with young Tuppy and the air is full of mangled fragments of engagement. Aunt Dahlia has lost a fortune at the gaming tables in Cannes and dare not tell Uncle Tom. And all the while the spectre of the Market Snodsbury Grammar School prize-giving hangs over the assembled company. It's a situation which cries out for Jeeves you would think. But Bertie is fed up with the assumption that he is merely an addendum to his personal attendant. There are more brains in the Wooster household than just Jeeves, you know! Stand back - Bertram Wooster is on the case!
Yates is a Futurist. Which is to say he makes a very good living flying around the world dispensing premonitory wisdom, aka prepackaged bull, to world governments, corporations, and global leadership conferences. He is an optimist by trade and a cynic by choice. He's the kind of man who can give a lecture on successive days to a leading pesticide manufacturer and the Organic Farmers of America, and receive standing ovations at both.
But just as the American Empire is beginning to fray around the edges, so too is Yates's carefully scripted existence. On the way to the Futureworld Conference in Johannesburg, he opens a handwritten note from his girlfriend, saying she's left him for a sixth-grade history teacher. Then he witnesses a soccer riot in which a number of South Africans are killed, to the chagrin of the South African PR people at Futureworld. Sparked by a heroic devastation of his minibar and inspired by the rookie hooker sent to his hotel room courtesy of his hosts, Yates delivers a spectacularly career-ending speech at Futureworld, which leads to a sound beating, a meeting with some quasi-governmental creeps, and a hazy mission to go around the world answering the question: Why does everyone hate us?
Thus begins an absolutely original novel that is fueled by equal parts subversive satire, genuine physical fear, and heartfelt moral anguish. From the hideously ugly Greenlander nymphomaniacal artist to the gay male model spy to the British corporate magnate with a taste for South Pacific virgin sacrifice rituals, The Futurist manages to be wildly entertaining and deadly serious at the same time.
Bertie Wooster looks pretty stylish in his new Tyrolean hat - or so he thinks: others, notably Jeeves, disagree. But when Bertie embarks on an errand of mercy to Totleigh Towers, things get quickly out of control and he's going to need all the help Jeeves can provide. There are good eggs present, such as Gussie Fink-Nottle and the Rev. 'Stinker' Pinker. But there also is Sir Watkyn Bassett J.P., enemy of all the Woosters hold dear, to say nothing of his daughter Madeline and Roderick Spode, now raised to the peerage. And Major Brabazon Plank, the peppery explorer, who wants to lay Bertie out cold.Thank goodness for the intervention of Chief Inspector Witherspoon of Scotland Yard - but is this gentleman all he seems?
Southern belle BeBe Loudermilk loses all her worldly possessions to the gorgeous Reddy who turns out to be a con man. All that's left is a ramshackle 1950s motor court on Tybee Island -- an eccentric beach town that calls itself a drinking village with a fishing problem.
Breeze Inn is a place where the very classy BeBe wouldn't normally be caught dead but, with no alternative, she vows to make magic out of mud. The work is grueling, especially dealing with the cantankerous caretaker, a fishing captain named Harry who's trying to earn enough dough to get his boat out of hock. With the help of Harry, BeBe soon has the motel spiffed up and attracting paying guests.
Then there's a sighting of Reddy in Fort Lauderdale, and BeBe decides to go after him. The plan is to carry out a sting that may be just a little bit outside the law but with any luck at all, will retrieve BeBe's fortune and put the dastardly Reddy in jail where he belongs. And maybe Harry, who's looking more hunky every day, will finally get his boat back.
Performed by Isabel Keating
'Heinz Strunk hat ein neues Genre geschaffen: Das Kurzhörspiel.
Ganz in der Tradition der frühen Helge Schneider-Hörspiele übernimmt Heinz Strunk sämtliche
Rollen und hat zudem alle Geräusche und Sounds selbst produziert. 30 Sekunden bis 5 Minuten dauern seine schrägen Momentaufnahmen aus dem Alltag, die von der hysterischen Zugansage bis zum schmerzhaften Arztbesuch reichen.'
A collection of fab sketches from 'Round the Horne's most flamboyant duo. In this first fantabulosa selection of sketches from BBC Radio's classic comedy 'Round the Horne', we find that two infamously outrageous resting thesps from Carnaby Street are game on for a variety of entrepreneurial endeavours. As Kenneth Horne trolls along in search of some essential service or other, the tinkle of a doorbell invariably brings him to one of Julian and Sandy's bona establishments.
Nestled among Seattle's skyscrapers, The Zephyr Holdings Building is a bleak rectangle topped by an orange-and-black logo that gives no hint of Zephyr's business. Lack of clarity, it turns out, is Zephyr's defining characteristic. The floors are numbered in reverse. No one has ever seen the CEO or glimpsed his office on the first (i.e., top) floor. Yet every day people clip on their ID tags, file into the building, sit at their desks, and hope that they're not about to be outsourced.
Stephen Jones, a young recruit with shoes so new they squeak, reports for his first day in the Training Sales Department and finds it gripped by a crisis involving the theft of a donut. In short order, the guilty party is identified and banished from the premises and Stephen is promoted from assistant to sales rep. He does his best to fit in with his fellow workers-among them a gorgeous receptionist who earns more than anyone else, and a sales rep who's so emotionally involved with her job that she uses relationship books as sales manuals-but Stephen is nagged by a feeling that the company is hiding something. Something that explains why when people are fired, they are never heard from again; why every manager has a copy of the Omega Management System; and most of all, why nobody in the company knows what it does.
