Satire
The Death of the Lion
This short novel is a black comedy about fame, manipulation, pretension, and surviving it all. The narrator, a reprehensible and seedy journ…
Love and Freindship
Love and Freindship [sic] is a juvenile story by Jane Austen, dated 1790, when Austen was 14 years old. Love and Freindship (the misspelling…
A Deal With The Devil
A Deal with the Devil is a classic tale with a humorous twist. We find that on the night preceeding his 100th birthday Grandpapa, a cantanke…
Buried Alive
Buried Alive is a dramatization of Arnold Bennett’s 1912 novel, adapted by James Duckett. This charming and witty satire tells the story of …
Erewhon
Erewhon is a thought-provoking novel by Samuel Butler that invites readers into a fictional land where the absurdities of Victorian society …
The School for Wives
In 1661 and 1662 Moliere presented the plays The School for Husbands and then The School for Wives (this one). "The central situations …
Cynthia's Revels
"Cynthia's Revels," the second "comical satire," was acted in 1600, and, as a play, is even more lengthy, elaborate, and…
The Sincere Huron
L'Ingénu is a satirical novella by the French writer Voltaire, published in 1767. It tells the story of a Huron Indian transported to…
The Glugs of Gosh
First published in 1917, The Glugs of Gosh satirizes Australian life at the start of the twentieth century - but the absurdities it catalogs…
A Traveller from Altruria
Set in the early 1890s, at a fashionable summer resort somewhere on the East Coast of the United States, this book tells the story of Mr. T…
The Curtezan Unmasked
"The Curtezan unmasked or, the Whoredomes of Jezebel Painted to the Life: With Antidotes against them, or Heavenly Julips to cool Men i…
Nightmare Abbey
Deep in the fens of the British coast sits the gloomy mansion that goes by the name Nightmare Abbey. It is inhabited by persons of very low …
Lucian's Dialogues
Dialogues of the Dead are 30 miniature dialogues mocking the Homeric conception of the Greek gods, originally written in Attic Greek by Syri…
A Bayard from Bengal
The estimable gentleman, Chunder Bindabun Bhosh, ESQ., B.A., travels from his native India to England, with his impeccable English and manne…
The Dead Dog Café Comedy Hour
The Dead Dog Café Comedy Hour is a fifteen-minute political and social satire radio series that revolves around Native people and the…
The Bourgeois Gentleman
The Bourgeois Gentleman of the title is a middle-class social climber, assured that by learning all the arts of a true and noble gentleman, …
The Miser
The Miser is a comedy of manners about a rich moneylender named Harpagon. His feisty children long to escape from his penny-pinching househo…
Widowers' Houses
This is one of three plays Shaw published as Plays Unpleasant in 1898; they were termed "unpleasant" because they were intended, n…
Gargantua and Pantagruel
The Life of Gargantua and of Pantagruel (in French, La vie de Gargantua et de Pantagruel) is a connected series of five novels written in th…
Knickerbocker's History of New York
Washington Irving, an author, biographer, historian, and diplomat, completed his first major work, a satire of contemporary local history an…