Satire
The Poetical Works of John Dryden
The first of two volumes of collected poetry by this revered and highly influential English restoration poet and playwright. The poems, many…
The Chronicles of Clovis
The Chronicles of Clovis brings together a delightful collection of short stories by Saki, featuring the mischievous and witty Clovis Sangra…
Samuel the Seeker
What would happen to you if you tried to make your way in the world believing all the clear, simple things you had ever been taught growing …
Absalom and Achitophel
John Dryden published Absalom and Achitophel: A Poem in 1681. It is an elaborate historical allegory using the political situation faced by …
An Apology for the Life of Mrs. Shamela Andrews
An Apology for the Life of Mrs. Shamela Andrews, or simply Shamela, as it is more commonly known, is a satirical novel written by Henry Fiel…
In Brief Authority
Satiric comedy from 1915 about a nouveau riche British family and their nanny who get whisked off to Maerchenland ('the land of Fairy Tales'…
The Satyricon
Satyricon (or Satyrica) is a Latin work of fiction in a mixture of prose and poetry. It is believed to have been written by Gaius Petronius,…
The Importance of Being Earnest
In this most popular of all Oscar Wilde’s plays, two fashionable bachelors, Jack Worthing and Algernon Moncrieff, discover that each has bee…
The Misanthrope
Alceste, the misanthrope, hates everyone including himself. But unlike in many pure farces with their cliche stock characters, the character…
Flatland
Math. Geometry. Physics. Violence? Is this the same book I read in school? Yep.
One of the joys of rediscovering old books is that they…
The Pickwick Papers
The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club, better known as The Pickwick Papers, is the first novel by Charles Dickens. Written for publicat…
The Blazing World
The Blazing World by Margaret Cavendish is, all at once, a satire, a treatise on natural philosophy, a work of proto-science fiction, and a …
Imaginotions
This is a collection of short stories by Tudor Jenks. Those stories are all written and composed in the way of a fairy tale, but they are no…
The History of the Life of the Late Mr. Jonathan Wild the Great
This novel is sometimes thought of as [Fielding's] first because he almost certainly began composing it before he wrote Shamela and Joseph A…
The Revolt of the Angels
Anatole France, in his satirical and allegorical fashion, weaves a tale of fantasy which finds a mischievous guardian angel stealing books f…
Northanger Abbey
Northanger Abbey is a hilarious parody of 18th century gothic novels. The heroine, 17-year old Catherine, has been reading far too many “hor…
The Tysons
Another frank May Sinclair exploration of fin de siècle English love and sex, marriage and adultery, "The Tysons" is the st…
The Westminster Alice
Published five years before John Kendrick Bangs had the same idea with Alice in Blunderland, Saki, in his 1902 series of satirical articles,…
Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions
This is a satirical novel written by Edwin A. Abbott, first published in 1884. Abbott uses a two-dimensional world, with himself as the prot…
Goldsmith's Friend Abroad Again
This satire on the U.S.A.'s myth of being the "Home of the Oppressed, where all men are free and equal", is unrelenting in its pur…