No Funny Business!
The Humor and Satire Awards are open through the end of October!
We are delighted to celebrate the 2023 Winners of the Humor and Satire Awards!
- Eileen O’Finlan – All the Furs and Feathers
- Allyson Rice – The Key to Circus-Mom Highway
- Marco Ocram – The Awful Truth About The Herbert Quarry Affair
- Lou Dischler – The Rising
- Steven Mayfield – The Penny Mansions
- Tom Strelich – Water Memory
The Grand Prize Winner for the CIBA 2023 Humor and Satire Awards is:
Quantum Consequence: Physics, Lust and Greed Series, Book 5
by Mike Murphey
More posts are to come celebrating these amazing winners, but we’re here to tickle your appetite with these great books we’ve reviewed in the meantime!
THE GARDEN PLOT DIARIES
By Endy Wright
Endy Wright’s The Garden Plot Diaries is a delightful collection of four short stories about life, relationships, and consequences.
Wright captures the gossip and rivalries between factious groups of town folk, all between sixty and ninety-something, who have known each other since childhood and carry the grudges to prove it. Our delightful narrator professes, “I am a rambling old man with a tale to tell and in no hurry to tell it.” So, settle in.
Hailing himself from New Hampshire, Wright has set these stories in Monadnock, a New England town/region which he peoples with a menagerie of colorful octogenarians who drink, dance, and feud. In the voice of his narrator again, “[these are stories] of chaos creeping into God’s Garden.” Wright’s stories certainly do deliver a wonderful kind of chaos and pandemonium usually expected in a kindergarten class.
LIAR, ALLEGED: A Tell-All: Celebrities, Sex and All the Rest
By David Vass
Liar, Alleged: A Tell-All: Celebrities, Sex, and All the Rest is a raw and mature memoir, the account of a resilient individual, David Vass, who had felt ‘instinctively’ different and shunned since he was a child.
Vass was born in Baltimore as the seventh child of eight. His large family knew nothing more than chaos and absurdity, biting poverty, a violent father, and an eternal hand-to-mouth crisis. At an early age, he had recognized his inextinguishable fascination with other males, a discovery that he would later bring himself to express to his mother. He was pretty confident that being gay was core to who he would become.
By the time he was twenty-four, David’s parents had already passed on. But as fate would have it, he would come to meet ‘the mother he never had’ in the jazz legend Anita O’Day. She dealt with problems of alcohol, drugs, and men; the outcome had been nine abortions, stubborn guilt, and infamy as a heroin addict. Nevertheless, the two would become close confidantes until Anita’s demise at the age of eighty-seven.
DRUNK TALK
By Mike Davis & TL Banks
Authors Davis and Banks have combined forces to create this humorous but practical look at how people think and why they act as they do.
The essential message of this satiric volume is that most people tend to nurse false notions about their lives and the universe in general – notions that the authors rapidly and thoroughly debunk. They take the stance of a drunk hanging out at a bar, hearing about everything that goes on in people’s minds. In forty-eight segments, various human problems are examined, derided, and substituted for what many readers will consider far more rational viewpoints.
Some issues raised seem trivial – “Celebrities” who do not, as might be supposed, get to enjoy their fame since the general attitude toward them is “shut up and entertain us or else.” Other matters are significant. One of the longer treatises focuses on “Gods,” with the authors asserting that God is merely an imaginary projection, and religion only a means of seeing and believing what people want, “even if it’s not real or makes no sense.” A true, non-superstition-based belief system would impel people to help others more and take full responsibility for their actions.
Hot Air: An Arnold Falls Novel, Book 2
By Charlie Suisman
Charlie Suisman returns to the unique fictional town of Arnold Falls in his humorous novel, Hot Air.
Arnold Falls bristles with zany events, quirky locals, and colorful newbies. Above all, this memorable enclave buoys its people through heart, soul, wit, and a true sense of collective spirit.
Jeebie Walker returns as the story’s central narrator.
EVERYTHING THAT WAS
By Conon Parks, Chris Sempek, Mike MacNeil, Larry Knight
Everything That Was echoes myriad broken emotions born of the world in turmoil after 9/11, intricate and politically bold, and as disturbing in its brutal humanity as it is satisfying with witty jests.
The 9/11 terrorist attack has shattered the psyche of the American people. A volcanic eruption of questions demands the whys and hows of the attack. From this anger, a massive war on terror begins. This historical fiction reflects the chaos of 9/11 and its ensuing global chaos – resulting in a series of violent endeavors and events. Throughout Everything That Was, one can find a swarm of fragmented ideologies, mini memoirs of war veterans, and witness accounts – all screeching reasons for the attack, the ensuing war, and its consequences: political, ideological, and theological.
The book’s very structure expresses the central ideas of its content, making for an affecting read.
Whether the story makes us stop and pause or burst out laughing, we’re so happy to have reviewed these books!
Is your Humor or Satire Book Ready to turn it up to 11?
This is the journey from beginning to end for the CIBAs Levels of Achievement is so worthwhile! Every list you make means more promotion for you and your work as each list is posted right here on our website, on our social media, and also out in our newsletter!
