Satire
Lucian's Dialogues
The Dialogues of the Gods are 26 miniature dialogues mocking the Homeric conception of the Greek gods written in Attic Greek by Syrian autho…
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 …
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…
Wives as They Were, Maids as They Are
This Restoration-Era comedy of manners satirizes the hypocrisy, gamesmanship, and imbalance of power inherent in the institution of marriage…
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 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 …
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 Chronicles of Clovis
The Chronicles of Clovis brings together a delightful collection of short stories by Saki, featuring the mischievous and witty Clovis Sangra…
Orlando, A Biography
Virginia Woolf's groundbreaking satire of British culture, customs, literature, philosophy, and politics from the Elizabethan era to the aut…
Don Juan
Don Juan "contains, perhaps, more severe attacks upon hypocrisy than does even Tartuffe. It depicts the hero as a man who, rich, noble,…
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…
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…
Arms and The Man
Arms and the Man is a comedy written by George Bernard Shaw, and was first produced in 1894 and published in 1898, and has become one of the…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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 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,…