Showing results for "Dead" in Literature & Fiction

Acclaimed author of The Adults Alison Espach’s short story "In-Depth Market Research Interviews with Dead People" is an at-once hilarious and heart-breaking portrait of a dead woman’s marriage and the Volvo that stood in the middle of it all.

Obituary writer Bud Stanley isn’t really living his best life. He’s fallen into a funk after a divorce. (She left him for another man, who, in fairness, was far more interesting.) He’s not doing his job well. He’s given up on dating. And he’s about to be fired for accidentally publishing his own obituary one mildly drunken night (though technically the company can’t legally fire a dead person). As Bud awaits his fate at work, he does the only logical thing: He goes to the wakes and funerals of total strangers to learn how to live again.

This manual provides a review of the tactical combat advantages enjoyed by zombies and gives the listener a step-by-step guide to adopting them for him or herself. Have you wondered where the great military leaders of modern history have found their collective inspirations? Well look no further. It is the walking dead upon whom the most important tactical infantry innovations of the last three hundred years have been based.

Since its publication in 1842, Dead Souls has been celebrated as a supremely realistic portrait of provincial Russian life and as a splendidly exaggerated tale; as a paean to the Russian spirit and as a remorseless satire of imperial Russian venality, vulgarity, and pomp. As Gogol's wily antihero, Chichikov, combs the back country wheeling and dealing for "dead souls"—deceased serfs who still represent money to anyone sharp enough to trade in them—we are introduced to a Dickensian cast of peasants, landowners, and conniving petty officials.

Chichikov, a mysterious stranger, arrives in a provincial town with a bizarre but seductive proposition for local landowners. He proposes to buy the names of their serfs who have died but who are still registered on the census, saving their owners from paying tax on them. But what collateral will Chichikov receive for these "souls"?

December, 1939. Having solved the case of the Suffolk Vampire, Inspector Betty Church and her colleagues at Sackwater Police Station have settled back down to business. There's the elderly Mr Fern, who keeps losing his slippers, Sylvia Satin's 13th birthday party to attend and the scintillating case of the missing bookmark to solve. Though peace and quiet are all well and good, Betty soon finds herself longing for some cold-blooded murder.

Now is not the time to start that fitness program! Instead, laugh along with humorist Dave Barry as he debunks, demotivates, and delights on the subject of fitness. Hear his inimitable views on exercise ("the best time would be the first thing after Easter, but not the one coming up"), weights ("big-time lifters have turned into 400-pound hairy sweaty shapeless grunting masses of tissue. And the men are even worse"), and much more.

Remi Finch has spent the better part of her adult life avoiding family—especially her sisters. They just don’t click. Besides, her unconventional upbringing and major anxiety have convinced Remi that she can’t build a relationship with anyone. Period. When her parents plan a family reunion camping trip to celebrate their anniversary, Remi’s willing to reconnect, if only because she doesn’t have a choice. But then a dead body turns up at their campsite, and their sisterly bonding kicks into high gear.

With its wickedly funny mimicry and on-point parodies, Dead Ringers became an instant classic when it hit the airwaves in January 2000. In these four series, first broadcast between 2020 and 2023, the team give us their inimitable impersonations of the famous and infamous: from Donald Trump and Joe Biden to Liz Truss, Professor Chris Whitty and Holly Willoughby.

The electrifying, "cutting-edge" (USA Today) debut work of fiction from Ron Currie, author of the forethcoming novel The One-Eyed Man (March 2017) Ron Currie’s gutsy, funny book is instantly gripping: If God takes human form and dies, what would become of life as we know it? Effortlessly...

Lucy Frampton just wants to make animated movies and to raise as functional a family as possible in the midst of Hollywood’s special brand of madness. Unfortunately, when her producer-husband Kit scores his first blockbuster movie, he is stricken with the dreaded "Mogus Virus"—(a common ailment!), which compels seemingly down-to-earth people to hire personal chefs and trainers and share enough air-kisses to inflate the Hindenburg. And adding to the crazy is the suspicious on-location death of his director, the much-despised whiz-kid Jeremy Lord. What’s a rational wife to do?

Victim. murderer. Serial killer. What next? The third darkly comic thriller in the highly addictive Sweetpea series featuring serial killer Rhiannon Lewis. Can a serial killer ever lose their taste for murder? Since confessing to her bloody murder spree, Rhiannon Lewis, the now-notorious Sweetpea killer, has been feeling out-of-sorts.Having fled the UK on a cruise ship to start her new life, Rhiannon should be feeling happy. But it’s hard to turn over a new leaf when she’s stuck in an oversized floating tin can with the Gammonati and screaming kids.

Meet Frankie: fifty, divorced and getting back on the horse. After leaving Twatface – her husband of twenty years – she's starting again from scratch. And when her son also flees the nest for university, Frankie decides it’s time to throw herself back into the dating game with a vengeance. On best friend Bel's recommendation, Frankie signs up to two dating apps: one for love, another for casual hook-ups. However, as she navigates this new frontier of catfishing, kittenfishing, DILFs, GILFs and everything in between, she realises the whole dating thing has changed quite a bit.

Deadeye Dick is Kurt Vonnegut's funny, chillingly satirical look at the death of innocence. Amid a true Vonnegutian host of horrors - a double murder, a fatal dose of radioactivity, a decapitation, an annihilation of a city by a neutron bomb - Rudy Waltz, aka Deadeye Dick, takes us along on a zany search for absolution and happiness. Here is a tale of crime and punishment that makes us rethink what we believe...and who we say we are.

In this fast paced sequel to The Everything Box—the second entry in New York Times bestselling author Richard Kadrey’s comedic supernatural series—chaos ensues when Coop and the team at DOPS steal a not-quite-dead and very lovesick ancient Egyptian mummy wielding some terrifying magic...

No Sunscreen for the Dead has descriptive copy which is not yet available from the Publisher...

When Inspector Peter Glebsky arrives at a remote ski chalet on vacation, the last thing he intends to do is get involved in any police work. He's there to ski, drink brandy, and loaf around in blissful solitude. But he hadn't counted on the other vacationers, an eccentric bunch, including a famous hypnotist, a physicist with a penchant for gymnastic feats, a sulky teenager of indeterminate gender, and the mysterious Mr. and Mrs. Moses.

The Hospital Ship is no more, and Yang Wei awakens to find himself at the mercy of monstrous doctors and the tumult of his own mind. Not helping matters, of course, is the Mars Hospital’s Pool of Dead Souls. A ghastly body of water, it traps people in an endless cycle of treatment, death, and resurrection. When an unruly band of patients revolts against this suffering, the Hospital descends into chaos, the likes of which have never been seen before.

When a young woman is kidnapped, Donal is brought in to deliver the ransom money. But the tightly planned drop off goes wrong, Julie Draper is discovered dead, and Donal finds his job on the line - a scapegoat for the officers in charge. But when Donal is delivered a cryptic message in the night, he learns that Julie was killed long before the botched rescue mission.

Gogol's great comic masterpiece paints an hilariously satirical picture of provincial life in 19th century Russia. Its publication in 1847 not only provided inspiration for succeeding generations of Russian writers, but fanned the already flickering flames of social discontent which were eventually to flare up and consume Russia in the revolution of 1917.