Satire & Dissent
Four hundred years of writers saying what everyone else was too polite to say — and getting away with it by making you laugh first. The full tradition of literary satire, from Cervantes to Bierce. Listen free on HearCandy.
Don Quixote, Vol. 1
1605. The first modern novel. A man reads too many chivalric romances and rides out to be a knight — tilting at windmills, misreading everything, and somehow becoming heroic. The book that invented fiction.
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Don Quixote, Vol. 2
Cervantes gets meta: people in Vol. 2 have read Vol. 1 and know who Don Quixote is. The most self-aware novel written until the 20th century, and funnier than Vol. 1.
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Gulliver’s Travels
Swift wrote this as a vicious satire of English society, European politics, and human nature. Tiny people, giants, talking horses — each voyage is a different angle of contempt for civilization.
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Candide
A naive young man travels the world being catastrophically optimistic while everything falls apart around him. Voltaire’s 1759 novella dismantled Leibnizian optimism in 90 pages. Still devastating.
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Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Huck and Jim on the Mississippi. Twain uses the voice of an innocent boy to expose the moral bankruptcy of slavery, religion, and respectability in the American South.
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A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court
A 19th-century American engineer wakes up in Camelot and tries to modernize it. Twain’s savage satire of both medieval romanticism and American industrial arrogance.
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Three Men in a Boat
Three men and a dog take a boat trip up the Thames and fail magnificently at every task. Jerome’s 1889 comic novel is still one of the funniest books in English.
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The Devil’s Dictionary
A dictionary in which every definition is a joke at civilization’s expense. Bierce published it piece by piece from 1881 to 1911. It remains the sharpest satirical work in American literature.
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