Empfehlungen basierend auf "Peck & Peck - A Novel"

“This amusing, sad, and heartfelt look at [Adams’s] lifeis a true gift.”—New York PostIt all started when Douglas Adams demolished planet Earth in order to make way for an intergalactic expressway—and then invited everyone to thumb a ride on a comical cosmic road trip in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Adams made the universe a much funnier place to inhabit and forever changed the way we think about towels, extraterrestrial poetry, and especially the number 42. And then, too soon, he was gone.In Wish You Were Here, Nick Webb, a longtime friend of the author, reveals the many sides, quirks, and contradictions of Douglas Adams. A summation as celebration, it is a look back at a life well worth the vicarious reliving, as studded with anecdote, droll comic incident, and heartfelt insight as its subject’s own unforgettable tales of cosmic wanderlust.Praise for Wish You Were Here“Webb’s tale brims with affection and humour; every page is a delight.”—The Daily Mail“It’s perhaps the ultimate credit to Webb that he can be just as funny as Adams in his writing. With many of the same veins of humour that Adams had running throughout this biography, it’s as if the great hitchhiker has never really left.”—The Leeds Guide

"Outlandish fun. . . . Making Money balances satire, knockabout farce and close observation of human — and non-human — foibles with impressive dexterity and deceptive ease. The result is another ingenious entertainment from the preeminent comic fantasist of our time.” — Washington PostThe hero of Going Postal returns in the 36th installment of Sir Terry Pratchett's beloved Discworld series! Moist von Lipwig, condemned prisoner turned postal worker extraordinaire, is now in charge of a different branch of the government: overseeing the printing of Ankh-Morpork’s first paper currency.Amazingly, former arch-swindler-turned-Postmaster General Moist von Lipwig has somehow managed to get the woefully inefficient Ankh-Morpork Post Office running like . . . well, not like a government office at all. Now the supreme despot Lord Vetinari is asking Moist if he'd like to make some real money. Vetinari wants Moist to resuscitate the venerable Royal Mint—so that perhaps it will no longer cost considerably more than a penny to make a penny.Moist doesn't want the job. However, a request from Ankh-Morpork's current ruling tyrant isn't a "request" per se, more like a "once-in-a-lifetime-offer-you-can-certainly-refuse-if-you-feel-you've-lived-quite-long-enough." So Moist will just have to learn to deal with elderly Royal Bank chairman Topsy (née Turvy) Lavish and her two loaded crossbows, a face-lapping Mint manager, and a chief clerk who's probably a vampire. But he'll soon be making lethal enemies as well as money, especially if he can't figure out where all the gold has gone.The Discworld novels can be read in any order, but Making Money is the second book in the Moist von Lipwig series.

Lemony Snicket's work is filled with bitter truths, like: 'It is always cruel to laugh at people, of course, although sometimes if they are wearing an ugly hat it is hard to control yourself.' Or: 'It is very easy to say that the important thing is to try your best, but if you are in real trouble the most important thing is not trying your best, but getting to safety.'For all of life's ups and downs, its celebrations and its sorrows, here is a book to commemorate it all – especially for those not fully soothed by chicken soup. Witty and irreverent, Horseradish is a book with universal appeal, a delightful vehicle to introduce Snicket's uproariously unhappy observations to a crowd not yet familiar with the Baudelaires' misadventures.

Michael Palin has kept a diary since newly married in the late 1960s, when he was beginning to make a name for himself as a TV scriptwriter (for The Two Ronnies, David Frost, etc). Monty Python was just around the corner.This volume of his diaries reveals how Python emerged and triumphed, how he, John Cleese, Graham Chapman, the two Terrys---Jones and Gilliam---and Eric Idle came together and changed the face of British comedy. But this is but only part of Palin's story. Here is his growing family, his home in a north London Victorian terrace, which grows as he buys the house next door and then a second at the bottom of the garden; here, too, is his solo effort---as an actor, in Three Men in a Boat, his writing endeavours (often in partnership with Terry Jones) that produces Ripping Yarns and even a pantomime.Meanwhile Monty Python refuses to go away: the hugely successful movies that follow the TV (his account of the making of both The Holy Grail and the Life of Brian movies are page-turners), the at times extraordinary goings-on of the many powerful personalities who coalesced to form the Python team, the fight to prevent an American TV network from bleeping out the best jokes on U.S. transmission, and much more---all this makes for funny and riveting reading. The birth and childhood of his three children, his father's growing disability, learning to cope as a young man with celebrity, his friendship with George Harrison, and all the trials of a peripatetic life are also essential ingredients of these diaries. A perceptive and funny chronicle, the diaries are a rich portrait of a fascinating period."Michael Palin is not just one of Britain's foremost comedy character actors, he also talks a lot. Yap, yap, yap he goes, all day long and through the night . . . then, some nights, when everyone else has gone to bed, he goes home and writes up a diary."---John Cleese "This combination of niceness, with his natural volubility, creates Palin's expansiveness."---David Baddiel, The Times"A real delight to read."---Saga Magazine (UK)"His showbiz observations are so absorbing. . . . Palin is an elegant and engaging writer."---William Cook, The Guardian (UK)"A wealth of fascinating stuff about Monty Python."---The Independent (UK)"Our favourite TV explorer shows us the workings of an unstoppable machine."---Daily Express (UK)"A riveting commentary to a remarkably creative decade."---Academy (UK)

‘The finest book ever written about England and the English’ Stuart Maconie ‘J. B. Priestley is one of our literary icons of the 20th Century and it is time that we all became re-acquainted with his genius.’ Dame Judi Dench Three years before George Orwell made his expedition to the far and frozen North in The Road to Wigan Pier, celebrated writer and broadcaster JB Priestley cast his net wider, in a book subtitled ‘a Rambling but Truthful Account of What One Man Saw and Heard and Felt and Thought During a Journey Through England During the Autumn of the Year 1933.’ Appearing first in 1934, it was a huge and immediate success. Today, it still stands as a timeless classic: warm-hearted, intensely patriotic and profound. An account of his journey through England – from Southampton to the Black Country, to the North East and Newcastle, to Norwich and home – English Journey is funny and tender. But it is also a forensic reading of a changing England and a call to arms as passionate as anything in Orwell’s bleak masterpiece. Moreover, it both captured and catalysed the public mood of its time. In capturing and describing an English landscape and people hitherto unseen, writing scathingly about vested interests and underlining the dignity of working people, Priestley influenced the thinking and attitudes of an entire generation and helped formulate a public consensus for change that led to the birth of the welfare state. Prophetic and as relevant today as it was nearly ninety years ago, English Journey is an elegant and readable love letter to a country Priestley finds unfathomable.

Adrian Mole faces the same agonies which life sets before most adolescents: troubles with girls, school, parents, and an uncaring world. The difference, though, between young Master Mole and his peers is that this British lad keeps a diary -- an earnest chronicle of longing and disaster that has convulsed more than five million readers since its two-volume initial publication. From teenaged Adrian's obsession with intellectuality after understanding "nearly every word" of a Malcolm Muggeridge broadcast to his anguished adoration of a lovely, mercurial schoolmate, from his view of his parents' constantly creaking relationship to his heartfelt but hilarious attempts at cathartic verse, here is an outrageous triumph of deadpan, and deadly accurate, satire. ABBA, Princess Di's wedding, street punks. Monty Python, the Falklands campaign -- all the cultural pageantry of a keenly observed era marches past the unique perspective of Sue Townsend's brilliant comic creation: A. Mole, the unforgettable lad whose self-absorption only gets funnier as his life becomes more desperate.Adrian Mole faces the same agonies which life sets before most adolescents: troubles with girls, school, parents, and an uncaring world. The difference, though, between young Master Mole and his peers is that this British lad keeps a diary--an earnest chronicle of longing and disaster that has convulsed more than five million readers since its two-volume initial publication. From teenaged Adrian's obsession with intellectuality after understanding "nearly every word" of a Malcolm Muggeridge broadcast to his anguished adoration of a lovely, mercurial schoolmate, from his view of his parents' constantly creaking relationship to his heartfelt but hilarious attempts at cathartic verse, here is an outrageous triumph of deadpan, and deadly accurate, satire. ABBA, Princess Di's wedding, street punks, Monty Python, the Falklands campaign--all the cultural pageantry of a keenly observed era marches past the unique perspective of Sue Townsend's brilliant comic creation: A. Mole, the unforgettable lad whose self-absorption only gets funnier as his life becomes more desperate.

“These final days of his San Francisco friends and lovers, gay and straight, are seriously moving. . . . Maupin deftly illustrates how far America and the pioneering Anna have come, and nearly forty years into the series, his writing remains wildly addictive but is deeper and richer.”—People By turns hilarious and heartbreaking, Armistead Maupin's bestselling Tales of the City novels—books 7, 8 and 9 collected in this third omnibus volume—stand as an incomparable blend of great storytelling and incisive social commentary on American culture from the seventies through the first two decades of the new millennium. Maupin’s bestselling epic series spans the decade before the AIDS crisis through the era of marriage equality, and follows an unforgettable cast of characters whose diverse sexual identities helped set the social stage for the ongoing sexual revolution. Goodbye Barbary Lane—comprised of Michael Tolliver Lives, Mary Ann in Autumn, and The Days of Anna Madrigal—joins two companion omnibus volumes, 28 Barbary Lane and Back to Barbary Lane, and is a must-have for fans of Maupin and the beloved series.

After an unexpected and diabolical farewell breakfast conversation with his father, Spud Milton returns to boarding school for his 1993 Matric year, his last as a schoolboy. Armed with a prefects’ tie and a raging libido, Spud soon discovers that being a large(ish) fish in a small pond has its fair share of challenges. He finds himself embroiled in fighting for his own room, directing a house play where both lead actors refuse to learn their lines, and assisting in Vern Blackadder’s dramatic return from the dead with nothing more than a drip cord and a pair of oven gloves. Amidst mounting pressure in the classroom and on the cricket field, Spud prepares to face down the most feared and dreaded challenge of them all—finding a date for the Matric dance. In this hilarious final installment of the Spud series, John Van de Ruit brings to a close his savagely funny blow by blow account of the agonies of growing up. The embarrassments, thrills, defeats, and the sheer-absurdity of daily life are wittily recorded in Spud’s unique voice as he prepares to make his own exit, pursued by a bear.

Is this the end for the Mennyms? For the forty years of their existence, the Mennyms assumed that their life would go on forever. Hidden in the safety of their home at 5 Brockenhurst Grove, the Mennyms carefully guarded the secret that they were actually a family of life-size rag dolls. Now Sir Magnus, the family patriarch, has had a premonition that their world is about to come to an end.Granny tulip is furious with her husband for even suggesting such a fate. Soobie, who has always been the troublesome grandchild, is suddenly serious, concerned with how his sister Pilbeam will take the news. And as the fateful day draws near, Vinetta, Joshua, Wimpey, Poopie, and the rest of the Mennyms think about how they will be remembered. Will they be seen merely as the finest rag dolls ever made, or will someone recognize them as the incredible family who was magically brought to life by the loving hands and heart of their creator?

We got our first taste of Adrian Plass's outrageous humour in The Sacred Diary of Adrian Plass, Age 37 3⁄4 and The Sacred Diary of Adrian Plass, Age 45 3⁄4. With over 2 million copies sold, these beloved bestsellers naturally placed the author's fanciful alter-ego in great demand as an inspirational speaker. And of course, his touring experiences have led to all-new stories to share with his friends. This sequel to the first two books will doubtless secure the Sacred Diarist's reputation as a spiritual authority. It's probably not the reputation he's hoping for, but it's the perfect medium for a bucketful of laughter. So meet the speaker, meet the crew and take a seat. It's time to join Adrian Plass on tour! Anne seems to think it would be a good idea to let people see some of the diary entries I've written in connection with the little seven-day speaking tour that she and I have just done ... On that innocent note, Adrian Plass whisks us along on one of the zaniest tours in his career as a Christian speaker. Besides his wife, his fictional entourage includes Gerald, his grown son, who is now a wise-cracking vicar; high-strung Leonard Thynn and his talented but surrealistic girlfriend, Angels Twitten; and the tour's Scripture-spouting benefactor, Barry Ingstone. First stop is the church of St. James the Hardly Visible at All, where a dour caretaker is waiting to set the tone for things to come. So hop on board - the tour is leaving, and you don't want to miss a thing.