![]() ![]() ![]() From reflective memoirs packed with the funniest of anecdotes (enter Billy Connolly), through to classics like Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, this list covers the spectrum.Īnd with some great offers currently available from Audible, there’s never been a better time to swap a hardback for a Stephen Fry narrated tale. These titles are ShortList Certified and categorically laugh-out-loud funny. It’s an eclectic old mix, hand-picked and approved by our team. ![]() It’s also why we’ve decided to round-up the funniest audiobooks around for your listening pleasure. Did you know laughter can help make you happy? It sounds like the stuff a clueless relative would tell you, but laughter can help the release or serotonin - the happy chemical. ![]()
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![]() ![]() this girl has to brave upon herself the situations she is thrown in and walk out of it unscathed or not. She is royal but penniless and what more, she is thirty fourth in line to the throne. ![]() The protagonist Georgie is a broke girl whose life takes her for a roller coaster ride. Here is another mystery series by Agatha award winning and mystery author Rhys Bowen – Royal Spyness series – set in the 1920s and 1930s! From a writer who is bestselling with New York Times, this series revolves around a penniless twenty something girl, named Lady Victoria Georginia Charlotte Eugenie, with royalty present only in the name. Be it avid readers or the ones that read to pass time, mysteries qualify as the best bet for an interesting and engrossing read. Mystery is a genre that has never lost and will never lose appeal amongst readers. On Her Majesty's Frightfully Secret Service ![]() ![]() ![]() Richard Dreyfuss Criticizes Oscar Diversity Requirements, Defends Blackface in Laurence Olivier’s ‘Othello’ Boseman should take the win in a category that makes him the seventh performer to earn a posthumous nomination. And the late Boseman landed just one, not two, nominations: Best Actor for “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom,” along with his larger-than-life costar, Viola Davis, the most nominated Black Actress in history. It was no surprise that “Da 5 Bloods” (Netflix) wasn’t going to make it - Spike Lee’s Vietnam epic earned just one Oscar slot, for Best Original Score, as critics prize-winner Delroy Lindo and Chadwick Boseman were both overlooked for acting nods. ![]() “One Night in Miami” (Amazon) and “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom” (Netflix) did not make the final eight for Best Picture. This year’s Oscar season was always going to be unconventional, with nominations taking place almost two months later than usual ahead of April’s delayed ceremony, but one aspect of the awards cycle remains unchanged: There were plenty of snubs and surprises, with the Academy delivering a diverse set of nominations that challenge many of the assumptions about the way things would play out.įirst, the shockers. ![]() ![]() ![]() For a mother whose half-Chinese children played outside while the kids of stricter immigrant neighbors could be heard laboring over the violin and piano, the book can be wickedly gratifying. “What Chinese parents understand,” Chua writes, “is that nothing is fun until you’re good at it.” By day, I would tell my own two daughters about how Chua threw unimpressive birthday cards back at her young girls and ordered them to make better ones. At night, I would nudge my husband awake to read him some of its more revealing passages, such as when author Amy Chua threatened to burn her older daughter’s stuffed animals if the child didn’t improve her piano playing. ![]() As a hopelessly Western mother married into a Chinese family living in an area that generates immigrant prodigies as reliably as clouds produce rain, I was eager to observe the comeuppance of a parent who thought she had all the answers.Īnd, in many ways, “Tiger Mother” did not disappoint. Although the memoir seems to have been written to prove that Chinese parents are better at raising children than Western ones, the cover text claims that instead it portrays “a bitter clash of cultures, a fleeting taste of glory” and the Tiger Mother’s humbling by a 13-year-old. The cover of “Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother” was catnip to this average parent’s soul. ![]() ![]() She is the 2014 winner of the Crab Creek Review poetry contest, and a New York Foundation for the Arts and Commonwealth Short Story Award Finalist. Her work has appeared in Black Renaissance Noire, The Caribbean Writer, Fourteen Hills Press, and elsewhere. Idrissa Simmonds is a fiction writer and poet. ![]() She directs the poetry program of the Nuyorican Poets Caf. Book Description: ' The BreakBeat Poets is one of the most diverse and important poetry anthologies of the last 25 years.'Latino Rebels. Browne is a Cave Canem and Poets House alumna and the author of several books including Smudge and Redbone. Influenced by Lucille Clifton and Gwendolyn Brooks, much of her writing explores blackness, womanhood, and the city of Chicago. Poet and vocalist Jamila Woods was raised in Chicago, and graduated from Brown University, where she earned a BA in Africana Studies and Theatre & Performance Studies. This anthology breaks up the myth of hip-hop as a boys' club, and asserts the truth that the cypher is a feminine form. Everyday low prices and free delivery on eligible orders. ![]() The BreakBeat Poets is] one of the most diverse and important poetry anthologies of the last 25 years.-Latino Rebelsīlack Girl Magic continues and deepens the work of the first BreakBeat Poets anthology by focusing on some of the most exciting Black women writing today. Browne, Idrissa Simmonds, Jamila Woods (ISBN: 9780007521159) from Amazon's Book Store. ![]() ![]() ![]() Steve Brusatte is an American paleontologist who teaches at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland. He traces the evolution of mammals up to the present day, sharing quirky facts (did you know that mammals' ear bones were once part of the jaw?) and introducing readers to the scientists who have made the study of mammals what it is today. In his new book, Brusatte dives into the mammalian lineage dating back to the synapsids, a bizarre group of animals that lived during the Carboniferous period (359 million to 299 million years ago) that eventually evolved into the mammals. Few are better poised to tell this tale than Brusatte, chair of paleontology and evolution at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, whose first book, The New York Times bestseller " The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs: A New History of a Lost World (opens in new tab)" (Mariner Books, 2018), connected readers with the diversity of scientists and their myriad discoveries about the dinosaur age. In the book, " The Rise and Reign of the Mammals: A New History, from the Shadow of the Dinosaurs to Us (opens in new tab)," released on Tuesday (June 7) by Mariner Books, paleontologist Steve Brusatte answers these questions and more. ![]() ![]() A sympathetic hero who faces danger and excitement, Black Beauty never wavers in his principles, and the powerful lessons he teaches influenced animal welfare in England and America. Describing his life as a horse in Victorian England, he tells of his equine companions and human carers, and of the unthinking brutality to which horses were often subjected. Black Beauty's moving story recounts his idyllic colthood and his experiences at the hands of a variety of owners, good and bad. ![]() It was written not for children, but to expose and prevent cruelty to horses, and is a classic of Victorian literature that continues to captivate readers young and old. ![]() 'I have heard men say, that seeing is believing but I should say that feeling is believing.'Īnna Sewell's famous 'Autobiography of a Horse, published in 1877, is one of the bestselling novels in English. ![]() ![]() That’s a hard question to answer! One of my absolute favorites in the thriller genre is The Silence of the Lambs by Thomas Harris. ![]() ![]() Steven Pinker’s The Better Angels of our Nature.ģ) Do you have a personal favorite book of all time? If so, can you share it and tell us why? Hostage Taker was great fun to write – and I hope readers will enjoy it! Where as a writer, I could blend my love of this city’s history with my desire to write a page-turner of a contemporary thriller. Where the only hope would be FBI agent Eve Rossi and her unconventional team of ex-convicts-a secret unit with extraordinary talents, oversized egos, and contempt for the rules. I looked at the chaos and upheaval, and beganto think: what if … ? Those what ifs built upon one another until I conceived a story where the fates of a beloved landmark and an unknown number of hostages were at stake. The idea for the novel came to me shortly after Saint Patrick’s Cathedral began its massive renovation project-and I first saw the Cathedral buried in scaffolding. Hostage Taker represents a new direction for me – specifically a change of genre and time-period. She was kind enough to come to the Columbus Ave store to sign some copies AND fill out our Q&A! Come grab your signed copy while we still have them, and check out the Q&A below.ġ) How did you come to write Hostage Taker? Stefanie Pintoff's book, Hostage Taker came out earlier this month. ![]() ![]() ![]() As she struggles to reconcile her resentment of the rich with the allure of glamour and excess, Camille meets a handsome young inventor, and begins to believe that love and liberty may both be possible.īut magic has its costs, and soon Camille loses control of her secrets. Using dark magic forbidden by her mother, Camille transforms herself into a baroness and is swept up into life at the Palace of Versailles, where aristocrats both fear and hunger for magic. ![]() But when the coins won’t hold their shape and her brother disappears with the family’s savings, Camille pursues a richer, more dangerous mark: the glittering court of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette. Relying on magic, Camille painstakingly transforms scraps of metal into money to buy food and medicine they need. When smallpox kills her parents, Camille must find a way to provide for her younger sister while managing her volatile brother. ![]() Paris is a labyrinth of twisted streets filled with beggars and thieves, revolutionaries and magicians. ![]() ![]() And Kordolians are usually too busy conquering the important parts of the nine galaxies to bother with us.īut it looks as if their battle cruiser is broken. That’s why aliens rarely bother to come to this corner of the universe. ![]() In the grand scheme of things, Earth is a total backwater, and the Solar System is the galactic equivalent of Hicksville. What the hell do they want with this floating rust bucket? What are they even doing here? Some scary looking aliens have just boarded Fortuna Tau, our little asteroid mining station. ***This book contains the first three Dark Planet Warriors books, Invasion, Taken and Escape (which were originally released as a three-part serial) in one single volume.*** Into the Light | Out of Darkness | Forged in Shadow | Infinity’s Embrace Other Books in Series: Dark Planet Falling | ![]() |