Showing results for "Text" in Satire

I'm Serafina Lopez, and I'm an astrologer. No, not the airy-fairy type who wears long flowy skirts and enormous hoop earrings—you know, unless I want to. I'm an uber-serious businesswoman. My popular lifestyle app, "Live for you Star Sign," is getting so big, I've just been asked to be a guest on New York's most-watched morning show. This TV segment is going to launch my career into the stratosphere. Imagine my surprise when I show up on set to find out that I'm not the only guest.

Autumn Jones is at a crossroads. With no job offers in sight, she can either return to Koshkonong, Wisconsin to work at her dad's feed store or she can move to New York and help her older sister Helen coordinate the Manhattan Kennel Club Show. She and Helen may fight like cats and dogs, but Autumn would rather live with a thousand Helens than go home after seven years of college.

Charlie Conroy has scraped together 22 awful seasons of low league baseball, forever hoping to escape his father's shadow. The son of Jackie Conroy, a talented minor leaguer who died tragically young, Charlie has built his career on a willingness to get hit by beanballs, and by having a stepfather who owns his team. When his stepfather also dies, Charlie's mother, Margaret, installs her son as a coach of Jackie's old team, the nearly bankrupt Cape Haddock Coelacanths.

In our bureaucratized culture, we’re inundated by documents: itineraries, instruction manuals, permit forms, primers, letters of complaint, end-of-year reports, accidentally forwarded email, traffic updates, ad infinitum. David Shields and Matthew Vollmer, both writers and professors, have gathered 40 short fictions that they’ve found to be seriously hilarious and irresistibly teachable (in both writing and literature courses): counterfeit texts that capture the barely suppressed frustration and yearning that percolate just below the surface of most official documents.