The Greatest Humour and Satire

The Misanthrope reads at first like one of those overheated old Russian novels in which everyone talks and talks, all very excitedly, while the action happens elsewhere. It's certainly Molière's most reflective play.... Critique • Quotes • Translations • Buy

There's so much to enjoy here, it's surprising this is not Molière's most popular play. After its initial run of twenty performances, it was hardly performed for several centuries until revived in the mid-1900s. And even now... Critique • Quotes • Text • Buy

Your first go at The Country Wife may leave you mystified. Especially mixed up over all the criss-crossing plots involving characters who can scarcely be told apart. They're all randy, witticism-spouting, wealthy layabouts.... Critique • Quotes • Buy

I'm not sure why The Rape of the Lock is Alexander Pope's most famous poem. I understand why it might have been popular in its day. It satirizes an incident that was infamous in a certain aristocratic crowd.... Critique • Quotes • Buy

Two things keep me from dismissing the drama She Stoops to Conquer as severely overrated. One: I don't recall seeing it performed. Live on stage it may be hilarious for all I know. And two: if it's overrated, it's been long.... Critique • Quotes • Buy

Northanger Abbey is the satire on popular literature Jane Austen had to write before she could get down to creating her own classics. It often happens in a first novel an author is driven to imitate and have fun with the work.... Critique • Quotes • Buy

In our world the escapades of young Tom Sawyer are recounted in the shadow cast by his more famous friend, Huckleberry Finn. Yet, during author Mark Twain's life, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer was his most.... Critique • Quotes • Text • Buy

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is one of those modern classics you should re-read every ten years or so. Partly because, like most classics, it keeps giving, offering up more and different aspects each time. Read in youth.... Critique • Quotes • Text • Buy

If you come to G.K. Chesterton's avowed masterpiece expecting a piece of early twentieth-century realism, you're going to be very surprised. If you've heard it's a mystery—hopefully along the lines of the.... Critique • Quotes • Text • Buy

Stephen Leacock gets compared to Mark Twain all the time, which means people like me have to keep pointing out how different he is. We have to keep pointing to Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town and showing.... Critique • Quotes • Text • At the movies • Buy

Stephen Leacock's Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich hardly ever gets discussed without being compared to Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town. The two are seen as companion pieces, Sunshine Sketches being.... Critique • Quotes • Text • Buy

Life in smalltown America has long been celebrated or satirized in fiction, but seldom as comprehensively or as pointedly as in Sinclair Lewis's first great novel, some would argue his greatest work. The impact of Main Street.... Critique • Quotes • Text • Buy

A century after its first publication, the story of George Babbitt can elicit reactions of both "This is so dated!" and "Just like today!" And often from the same readers. Sinclair Lewis's most influential novel, Babbitt, deftly satirizes.... Critique • Quotes • Text • Buy

When they got around to making the movie of Elmer Gantry—more than three decades after the novel came out—they still felt compelled to preface it with a warning: We believe that certain aspects of Revivalism can bear.... Critique • Quotes • Buy

I wonder if people who refer to Aldous Huxley's Brave New World as a cautionary tale—that is, those who aren't confusing it with George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four—could actually spell out what it is cautioning against.... Critique • Quotes • Buy

The Day of the Locust was so underrated in 1939 when it came out and in the years immediately following author Nathanael West's death in 1940, that when critics eventually rediscovered the man's works they.... Critique • Quotes • At the movies • Buy

To get an idea of what the Hitchhiker's Trilogy is like, you have only to read the titles of the five novels that comprise it: The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy; The Restaurant at the End of the Universe; Life, the Universe.... Critique • Quotes • At the movies • Buy