Satire
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 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…
Satires
Decimus Iunius Iuvenalis, known in English as Juvenal, was a Roman poet active in the late 1st and early 2nd century AD. The details of the …
Orlando, A Biography
Virginia Woolf's groundbreaking satire of British culture, customs, literature, philosophy, and politics from the Elizabethan era to the aut…
Lesley Castle
Lesley Castle is a melodramatic epistolary novelette written by Jane Austen when she was sixteen years old. Although the novels Austen becam…
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…
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…
The Wit and Humor of America
The Wit and Humor of America is a delightful collection that showcases the rich tapestry of American wit through a variety of short stories …
The Wit and Humor of America
The Wit and Humor of America is a delightful collection that showcases the rich tapestry of American wit and humor through a selection of sh…
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…
John Donne's Satires
Donne’s StyleIn John Donne’s day, a satire was such a poem as a satyr might compose. Satyrs were rough, savage creatures in Greek mythology…
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…
Tono-Bungay
Tono-Bungay is a realist semi-autobiographical novel. It is narrated by George Ponderevo, a science student who is drafted in to help with t…
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 Misses Mallett
The arrival of the eligible Francis Sales disturbs the calm existence of the four Misses Mallett in this social satire. Three women love him…
The Crocodile
Ivan Matveich, the most ordinary person you might hope to meet, is swallowed alive by a crocodile at a sideshow. Finding life inside the be…
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…
And Even Now
This is a diverse collection of essays by English writer Max Beerbohm, whose circle included such notables as Oscar Wilde, George Bernard Sh…
The Imaginary Invalid
The Imaginary Invalid is a sharp and humorous three-act comédie-ballet by the renowned French playwright Molière. This satiric…
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…