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…
The Acharnians
Loaded with cryptic, nearly indecipherable inside jokes and double entendres, this early comedy of Aristophanes has a simple, anti-war premi…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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 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 …
Penguin Island
The novel (original French title -- L'Île des Pingouins) is a satire on human nature. The first publication was in 1908. These penguin…
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 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 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 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…
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 …
Lesley Castle
Lesley Castle is a melodramatic epistolary novelette written by Jane Austen when she was sixteen years old. Although the novels Austen becam…
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…
Curiosities of Street Literature
This is a collection of broadsides from London. Broadsides are short, popular publications, a precursor to today's tabloid journalism. The c…
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 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…
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…