Tag Archives: Humor

Boulong’s Cheese Blitz

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Boulong's Cheese cover

Humor, Comedy, Satire

Published: September 30, 2021

Publisher: Black Rose Writing

 

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The introduction of a successful vaccine against Covid has produced the
unintended side effect of rendering all gunpowder in the world inert. Every
weapon from a six-shooter to an atom bomb is now useless. However, on a
fifty-seven-acre island in the middle of the Doubs River that divides France
and Switzerland, a dairy farmer’s prized cheese spread has gone into short
supply and the world is about to go to war over its loss.

 

“Boulong’s Cheese” is spitfire humor, biting satire, and just
what the world needs now that the end of the pandemic is in sight. It pits
the Queen of England against the new, bald President of the United States,
and gives the Pope a way out of an embarrassing video. All the while,
Boulong, the producer of the world’s most desired dairy products,
tries to deal with his pregnant girlfriend and missing son.

Boulong's Cheese tablet, paperback

About the Author

Ricky Ginsburg

Ricky Ginsburg is one of those writers who sees a flock of birds heading
south for the winter and wonders what they talk about on their journey. His
portfolio consists of nearly 400 short stories, more than half of which have
found their way into various magazines, both paper and electronic, and seven
novels, half by Black Rose Writing and the other half self-published. While
much of his writing has elements of magical realism and humor, he also has a
serious side, but keeps it in a small plexiglass box under his desk.

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Heart of Swine Blitz

 

Heart of Swine cover

Dystopian, Humor

 

Publisher: Obex Publishing

A Ridiculously Realistic, Deadly Serious Comedy – With a Superhero Pig

Think you’re living in an environmental dystopia?

Wait until we start thawing a frozen planet with pig farts.

That’s where the story begins and it doesn’t get any less wild. At once ridiculous and chilling, rising surrealist talent Freddy F. Fonseca explores the dark, porky underbelly beneath humanity’s seemingly ever-more-virtuous race toward sustainability – and the genius puppet-masters who watch our feeble bamboo-straw-buying attempts and smile, while flattening another rainforest.

Oh yeah, and there’s our hero. The last remaining pig on Earth just happened to be blessed with superpowers. Which he would use to avenge the extermination of his species, were he not to get tangled up in an all-too-human web of greed, lust, and indifference.

The anarchic and ambitious Heart of Swine has breath-taking scope and a wry, not totally resigned smile. It incautiously pulls away the covers to reveal how half-assed humanity’s efforts to clean up after itself have been. It’s funny and coarse, sure, but the writer is deadly serious. The epic failures we continue to see around the world on a personal and political level are taken to frightening lengths. And reading Heart of Swine is like a Rorschach test for one’s outlook on the future – although it’s hard to think, especially after finishing this book, that everything’s going to be just fine.

Heart of Swine paperback


About the Author

Freddy F. Fonseca

Freddy F. Fonseca graduated with a First Class Honours in Creative Writing and English Literature from LMU and has a MSc in Environment, Politics and Society from UCL.

The writer strives to create stories that reflect the complexity of human nature and question the unhealthy entanglement with materiality.

What pushed Freddy to write Heart of Swine is the fact that too many don’t understand their accent.

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Apricot Marmalade Blitz

 

Apricot Marmalade cover

 

Historical Fiction, Humor

 

 

Published: July 2021

Publisher: ‎Page Publishing

A satirical romp through 1968 Thailand follows a team of US intelligence agents matching wits with enemy operatives.

It was 1968 and the war was not going well. The surprisingly-effective Tet Offensive in January had humbled and embarrassed the South Vietnamese and their American allies. It had sent a powerful message to the folks back home that this Vietnam thing wasn’t going to be over anytime soon. Americans in general were growing weary of its intrusion into their living rooms every evening on the six o’clock news.

Meanwhile in Bangkok, Thailand, just a stone’s throw from the battlefields, the special agents assigned to the 187th Military Intelligence Detachment, the US Army’s counterespionage arm, are dealing with the war and its implications for the rest of Southeast Asia in their own way. They dress in civilian clothes and carry credentials while performing counterintelligence investigations and surveillance of suspected enemy agents. As a group, they are an unruly and undisciplined lot whose often humorous attempts to carry out their assignments and stay out of trouble rarely succeed. The tone of this book has been compared to that of the classics “MASH” and “Catch 22.”

Apricot Marmalade paperback


About The Author

Lon Orey

Lon Orey served in Military Intelligence in the late sixties. Much of that time was spent in Bangkok, Thailand, after studying the language for a year at the Defense Language Institute in Monterey, California. While this is a work of fiction, the framework within which the story is told reflects his real-world observations of the country and the various intelligence services operating there, as enhanced by a fertile imagination. Those intelligence services included the CIA, the KGB, and Thailand’s own intelligence agency, AFSC. He had fun writing this book, with tongue planted firmly in cheek, and he hopes you will have fun reading it.

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Zither! Tour

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Metafiction/Humor/Mystery

 

Date Published: April 20th, 2021

Publisher: Zither Studios

A nutty religious cult abducts a herd of prime gazebos (huh?) and it’s up to bumbling P.I. Mars Candiotti to rescue them. Mars, aspiring author, chronicles his quest in Jeffrey Hanlon’s comic mystery Zither

 Guided by his magically prescient IHOP waitress, Mars strives to mitigate the shocking global consequences of the gazebo heist, even though he has no idea what the word mitigate means. Mars has five Important clues with which to solve his confounding mystery: Butterscotch, John Travolta, Trombones Venetian Blinds, and Wind Chimes. 

 As Zither swallows its own tale, Mars finds it increasingly tricky to distinguish between real people and his rambunctious fictional characters. Zither becomes the romper room where his reality meets fantasy – and get frisky with each other. 

 Using his (odd) clues, Mars’ international odyssey leads to an explosive conclusion in Panama. TVs around the world tune in to watch live coverage of “Carnage in the Canal”. 

 Amid the lunatic havoc that is Zither there is (of course!) an epic love story as Mars meets Marian, the brainy librarian he had dreamed of. Marian says his books are “slapstick existentialism with subjective reality couched in parable”. (This is news to Mars). But is Marian real? 

 Is any of it real?

 

 

EXCERPT

As nightfall approached, we prepared.

Pete disguised himself as management, putting on a nice Men’s Wearhouse suit with a bleeding turnip lapel pin.

I disguised myself as Britney Spears.

At the stroke of midnight, Pete and I left his house, which is and headed for the St. Francis Yacht Club.

As contrived luck would have it, Benny Tisdale had left the cabin on his dumb boat unlocked.

In stealthy fashion, Pete and I went below.

“I’ll shine the flashlight and listen for footprints. You find the varnish,” Pete said.

It took no time at all to find Benny’s Man O’ War. Actually, it took a bit of time, but you know what I mean.

As Pete held the light, I donned my surgical gloves and placed Benny’s Man O’ War in my black op bag.

“Easy as taking candy from a drowning man,” Pete whispered.

I nodded.

Pete said, “It’s dark in here, Mars. If you’re going to nod, warn me so I can shine the flashlight on your head.”

“Okay, Pete. We’ll make that a new rule.”

As we prepared to exit in stealthy fashion, Pete shined his flashlight around the cabin, then said, “Mars, look at this big wooden crate.”

I looked at the wooden crate. It was big enough to hold a Barcalounger.

“I’ll bet it’s filled with ill-gotten booties,” Pete said. “Or a Barcalounger.”

He handed me the flashlight and pried open the crate’s lid with a crowbar. 

It was not until some time after dark that we took courage to get up and throw the body overboard. It was then loathsome beyond expression, and so far decayed that, as Peters attempted to lift it, an entire leg came off in his grasp . . .

“Peters?” Pete said. “Do you mean Pete? Me? What body? What leg?”

“Sorry. That’s Edgar Allen Poe, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym.

“What’s Poe doing in this chapter?”

I shined the flashlight on my shoulder and shrugged. 

He snatched the light back, looked in the crate, and said, aghast, “We’ve gotta get outta here quick, Mars! This boat could blow any minute!”

I looked inside the big wooden crate.

Here is what was in there: hundreds, probably thousands, of Steven Seagal movies.

We’d be lucky to get out of there alive.

Seagal movies have a tendency to bomb.

“Hanlon’s humor shines bright and will leave fans of such madness wanting more.” Publishers Weekly 

 “This zany, rollicking mystery adventure is as compelling as it is hilarious.” Independent Book Review 

 Nominated for the prestigious Audie Award, Best Fiction 2021

 

About the Author

Jeffrey Hanlon,

I was born in a Southern California beach town. 

 
My family moved to Northwest Oregon when I was 7. Or maybe when I was 8. 
 
Had we stayed in the Beach Boys town, and knowing myself as I do now, I suspect I would have grown long hair, started a rock band, and been heavily into drugs. The rock band would probably have been pretty good. The rest of it, not so much. I’d likely have joined the ranks of those like Jim Morrison and Janis Joplin. 
 
We moved to a mountaintop. The last five miles to get there were gravel. The final two miles were steep and to the end of the road. 
 
That’s where we lived: the end of the road, 22 miles to the nearest town. 
 
Our closest neighbor, about a mile down the road, was a hermit who lived in a shack. He had a goat. About once a month the goat would visit us. Then the hermit would show up to retrieve his goat. I think the goat liked us better than the hermit, which is why the goat kept showing up. Goats are funny animals. I think they aspire to be house pets. 
 
And speaking of animals, we had cats. Lots and lots of cats. Because we were remote and at the end of the road, unkind people – and ‘unkind’ is the kindest description I can use here – would dump their unwanted cats on or near our property. The cats would find our house. We gave them Fancy Feast and our love, and in turn they loved us. 
 
My childhood friends didn’t visit too often. That was at least partly because when they did show up my father would say something like this: “Great! We have a job that could use an extra hand. Won’t take more than five minutes.” Well, that five minutes usually turned into an hour or two – volunteer labor! – and that friend would seldom visit again. 
 
So my favorite childhood playmate was a 2000 pound Hereford bull, a big boy with horns spanning three feet. I’d go out in the pasture and the bull would strike a pose not unlike what you’ve seen in the movies where the bull was ready to charge, head down, eyeing me. But he wasn’t going to charge me. He just wanted his forehead scratched. And so I would scratch his forehead. He liked that, shaking his head every so often to show his approval. Then we’d elevate to a game that the bull might have called ‘Let’s see how far we can toss this little kid!’ and I’d place my right hip against his massive head and he’d toss me into the air like a sack of flour. Over and over, farther and farther, higher and higher. I could have done that for hours – I can fly! – but after a few tosses the bull would grow bored with the game and wander off. Probably to chase some cute heifers. 
 
The nearest library was 30 miles away, and we ventured there often. It was a majestic old building, and the Grand Room had books on all four walls with reading chairs in the center. But that was not where I wanted to be. I figured all those books were popular books or books I was supposed to read. I wanted something different, so I would enter the room with a small sign that said ‘Stacks’. It was row after narrow row after row of books, floor to ceiling, dimly lit, dusty. It was like entering a cave. Filled with treasures! 
 
It was in those Stacks that I discovered the likes of Kerouac and Heller and Huxley and Fowles and Steinbeck and Ellison and Bradbury and Hemingway and many many others. 
 
As Stephen King said, “Books are a uniquely portable magic.” 
 
And those, each in their own way, was the inspiration for the first book I wrote at the age of eight or nine: ‘Pond Scum’. 
 
It was illustrated.

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Zither! Blitz

 

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Metafiction/Humor/Mystery

 

Date Published: April 20th, 2021

Publisher: Zither Studios

A nutty religious cult abducts a herd of prime gazebos (huh?) and it’s up to bumbling P.I. Mars Candiotti to rescue them. Mars, aspiring author, chronicles his quest in Jeffrey Hanlon’s comic mystery Zither

 Guided by his magically prescient IHOP waitress, Mars strives to mitigate the shocking global consequences of the gazebo heist, even though he has no idea what the word mitigate means. Mars has five Important clues with which to solve his confounding mystery: Butterscotch, John Travolta, Trombones Venetian Blinds, and Wind Chimes. 

 As Zither swallows its own tale, Mars finds it increasingly tricky to distinguish between real people and his rambunctious fictional characters. Zither becomes the romper room where his reality meets fantasy – and get frisky with each other. 

 Using his (odd) clues, Mars’ international odyssey leads to an explosive conclusion in Panama. TVs around the world tune in to watch live coverage of “Carnage in the Canal”. 

 Amid the lunatic havoc that is Zither there is (of course!) an epic love story as Mars meets Marian, the brainy librarian he had dreamed of. Marian says his books are “slapstick existentialism with subjective reality couched in parable”. (This is news to Mars). But is Marian real? 

 Is any of it real?

 

“Hanlon’s humor shines bright and will leave fans of such madness wanting more.” Publishers Weekly 

 “This zany, rollicking mystery adventure is as compelling as it is hilarious.” Independent Book Review 

 Nominated for the prestigious Audie Award, Best Fiction 2021

 

About the Author

Jeffrey Hanlon

Jeffrey Hanlon spends his time in shorts and sandals making up silly stories like Zither.

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