Showing results by publisher "Highbridge, a division of Recorded Books" in Comedy & Humor

Ho ho ho! Here's what to listen to while driving to the mall, wrapping gifts, entertaining friends, or relaxing in front of a crackling holiday fire. In Scott Simon's modern version of the Christmas story, Jesus is born in an abandoned factory near Cleveland and the Three Wise Persons bring Chipotle gift cards. Claudia Sanchez gives a Latin accent to "A Visit from St. Nicholas". Barbara Bradley Hagerty explores what Christmas means for the boy choristers of the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C. (Hint: Handel).

What’s a "driveway moment"? It’s when you’re so captivated by a story you’re hearing on NPR that you stay in your car to hear it to the end - even if you’re sitting in your driveway with the motor running. For years, listeners have written to NPR to describe such moments. Now animal lovers especially will want to make sure their tanks are full. Heard on All Things Considered, Morning Edition, Talk of the Nation, and Wait Wait - Don’t Tell Me!, these stories will make you laugh out loud and shed a tear or two.

Evoking such classics as Elmer Gantry and The Day of the Locust, William Giraldi's About Face boldly transfers the perennial literary themes of celebrity, ambition, and obsession to twenty-first-century Boston. There we meet Val Face, a charismatic self-help guru who captivates multitudes with his uncanny ability to heal adherents using only the power of his words, the mysterious touch of his hands, and the transcendent beauty of his face.

Most NPR listeners have experienced at least one "driveway moment": You’re so captivated by a story, interview, or essay you’re hearing on the radio that you sit in your driveway, motor running, to hear it all the way through. Even if the ice cream is melting in the trunk. The latest collection of this best-selling series features memorable tales, bits, and commentary from NPR favorites, regulars, and guests. Smartly chosen, sincerely hilarious, this collection will leave you in stitches.

After his mother, a theologian and best-selling author, dies in a fiery explosion,49-year-old Calvin Bledsoe's heretofore uninspired life is upended. A stranger shows up at the funeral, claiming to be Calvin's aunt Beatrice, and insists that Calvin accompany her on a trip to Europe, immediately. As he and Beatrice traverse the continent, it quickly becomes apparent that his aunt's clandestine behavior is leading him into danger.

Moms have served honorably in the minivan wars, negotiated conflicting advice between husbands and fathers, and even extracted sticky sippy cups from under countless seats. Tom and Ray Magliozzi, aka Click and Clack, the Tappet Brothers, answer calls about - and from - mothers, answering questions and giving advice on cars, families, and cutting the apron strings.

Framed by the oil shale bust and the real estate boom, by protests against Reagan and against the Gulf War, The Optimistic Decade takes us into the lives of five unforgettable characters and is a sweeping novel about idealism, love, class, and a piece of land that changes everyone who lives on it. There is Caleb Silver, the beloved founder of the back-to-the-land camp Llamalo, who is determined to teach others to live simply. There are the ranchers, Don and son Donnie, who gave up their land to Caleb, having run out of options after Exxon came and went and left them bankrupt.

Kitty, Kieran, Lolly, and Aaron—the main characters of the previous two Pig Trilogy novels—would be expected to be living happily ever after at this point. But nothing is settled or as expected in Caldwell’s new tragicomedy (of the kind that only the Irish can compose): Disappeared characters rematerialize, romances that seemed dead burst back to ardent life, and even Taddy and Brid, Castel Kissane’s comely spirits, resolve themselves into much-longed-for conclusions.

Enjoy a “second helping” from the obstreperous creature that romped so riotously through The Pig Did It with this sequel, The Pig Came to Dinner. All of the charming characters of the previous story are also present again....

Iris - the narrator and heroine - guides the listener through 24 episodes from her life, pausing now and then for meditations on love; sex; work; loneliness; insomnia; arctic exploration; cannibalism; the Higgs boson; Greek mythology; memory; costumes parties; time travel; Rocky and Rocky II, V, IV, VI, and III, respectively; literary immortality; real estate trends; and growing up and growing old.

Adrianne Geffel was a genius. Praised as the "Geyser of Grand Street" and the "Queen of Bleak Chic," she was a one-of-a-kind artist, a pianist and composer with a rare neurological condition that enabled her to make music that was nothing less than pure, unmediated emotional expression. She and her sensibility are now fully integrated into the cultural lexicon; her music has been portrayed, represented, and appropriated endlessly in popular culture. But what do we really know about her?

It's 1994, and the former Yugoslavia is being torn apart. In England a gang of good-hearted young people are about to set off in a Ford Transit van armed with several sacks of rice and a half-written play. A play which will light a beacon of peace across the Balkans and, very probably, stop the war. Andrew would love to stop the war. He has one of the most comprehensively developed personal foreign policies of anyone working on a building site in the Greater Manchester area. He feels everyone should have a foreign policy, really. What sort of person doesn't?

In September 2000, a young programmer comes home from a desert festival to learn that his grandfather has died and that he has to return to Thebes - a town which is so isolated that its inhabitants have their own language - in order to clean out the house where his family lived for five generations. While he’s there, he runs into Yesim, a Turkish American woman whom he loved as a child, and begins a romance in which past and present are dangerously confused.

All his life, Giovanni Bernini has possessed an uncanny gift: He can imitate anyone he meets. Honed by his mother at a young age, the talent catapults him from small-town obscurity to stardom. As Giovanni describes it, "No one's disguise is perfect. There is in every person, no matter how graceful, a seam, a thread curling out of them... When pulled by the right hands, it will unravel the person entire."

Frank Dixon’s first novel, Plague Boy, is sinking into oblivion on Amazon and neither his nor anyone else’s literary agent will return his calls. Then Frank discovers online poker, and is soon addicted to the rush he feels as the successful, popular “Chip Zero”. But as he wins thousands of dollars, it soon becomes clear that his Internet success is not the solution to his problems. And when the virtual world comes crashing in on Frank’s real life, it can only mean trouble.

Suzie's seen it all, but now she's looking for something she lost: a sense of the future. So when the chance comes to work with a maverick video artist on his road movie about Donald Trump's America, she's pretty sure it's a bad idea, but she signs up anyway, hoping for an outside shot at starting over. A provocative, genderqueer, shape-shifting musical romp through the brain-eating nightmare of contemporary America, I Heart Oklahoma! is about art, guns, cars, American landscapes, and American history.

One of the many well-educated Ivy League graduates with literary ambitions who flock to New York City every year, 25-year-old Melissa Fleischer has the great fortune to work as the assistant to Austin Bloch, an editor responsible for refining and publishing the work of some of America's most esteemed writers. But after she begins working at this prestigious magazine in the late 1970s, Mel soon learns that the extravagantly long lunches her boss indulges in actually belie his affairs with a stream of young women.

Spike is an English bull terrier with a keen comedic eye for human foibles. He rockets to TV and internet fame after appearing on The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon, along with his master, Bud, who hosts a local morning show in High Point, North Carolina. Spike and Bud soon hit the fast track to bigger stardom when Bud signs on for a talk show in New York City.

James Orr - husband, father, reliable employee and all-around model citizen - awakes one morning to find half his face paralyzed. Waiting for the affliction to pass, he stops going to work and wanders his idyllic estate, with its woodland, uniform streets and perfectly manicured lawns. But there are cracks in the veneer. And as his orderly existence begins to unravel, it appears that James himself may not be the man he thought he was.

Funny, comforting, and nostalgic - kind of like Dad - Driveway Moments for Dads is over 100 minutes of NPR at its finest. You'll want it for your father and yourself, and for those you know who frequently finds themselves in their driveways, tuned to NPR, listening to the end of a story.