Satire
The Notary's Nose
Ironic and Satirical: A successful Parisian notary, Alfred L’Ambert, is smitten with a fourteen-year-old ballet dancer. After a quarrel, his…
The Acharnians
Loaded with cryptic, nearly indecipherable inside jokes and double entendres, this early comedy of Aristophanes has a simple, anti-war premi…
The Vegetable
"Any man who doesn’t want to get on in the world, to make a million dollars, and maybe even park his toothbrush in the White House, has…
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 …
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 House with the Green Shutters
The House with the Green Shutters is a novel by the Scottish writer George Douglas Brown, first published in 1901 by John MacQueen. Set in m…
Bill Nye's Cordwood
From Galileo to Grover Cleveland, from wasps to cattle, from dinosaurs to the railroad, Bill Nye's wide ranging wit pokes gentle fun at ever…
The Shaving of Shagpat
The Shaving of Shagpat is a whimsical oriental romance that weaves together humor and allegory in a style reminiscent of the Arabian Nights.…
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…
Letters of Jonathan Oldstyle, Gent.
The Letters of Jonathan Oldstyle, Gent. (1824) is a compilation of eight humorous and observational letters written by American writer, Wash…
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 …
A Family of Noblemen
Meet the Golovliovs, the ultimate dysfunctional family. In the difficult transition years before and after the liberation of Russia’s serfs,…
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…
Monsieur De Pourceaugnac
'Monsieur de Pourceaugnac', acted on October 6, 1669, is nothing but a farce. But Molière excels in farce as well as in higher comedy…
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…
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…
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…
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 Satyrs of Decimus Junius Juvenalis
16 satires in verse of the celebrated classical poet of the 1st and 2nd Century translated into verse by John Dryden an English satirist of …
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…