Satire
Satan's Diary
"Satan's Diary", Andreyev's last work, was completed by the great Russian a few days before he died in Finland, in September, 1919…
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 Judgment of Eve
May Sinclair was a prolific author, literary critic, and feminist activist, famous in Britain and the US in the 1910’s and 20’s. The Judgmen…
Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offences
Fenimore Cooper - author of The Deerslayer, The Last of the Mohicans, etc - has often been praised, but just as often been criticised for hi…
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 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 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 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…
Mary Broome
Before Downton Abbey, there was Mary Broome. In Allan Monkhouse's 1911 satire, when the son of a middle-class household gets their housemaid…
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…
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…
Conversation, as it was by the Social Fireside
Please note: this recording contains strong language."1601," wrote Mark Twain, "is a supposititious conversation which takes …
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 …
An Essay on the Art of Ingeniously Tormenting
An Essay on the Art of Ingeniously Tormenting was a conduct book written by Jane Collier and published in 1753. The Essay was Collier's firs…
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 Acharnians
Loaded with cryptic, nearly indecipherable inside jokes and double entendres, this early comedy of Aristophanes has a simple, anti-war premi…
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…