Given the state of the world today, laughter truly is the best coping mechanism. The best satire is all about excess in design, intention, characterization, and deployment of attitude. The more extreme, the better; leave restraint to the prudish moralists!
In Travis Jeppesen's Settlers Landing, a wholly fantastic yet nightmarishly real excavation of the Trumpian malaise, Mrdok is a self-made billionaire who has everything he wants and needs, and quite often, too much of it. What he does not yet have is his own private island. So when he discovers Sagosia, a former pirate colony in the lost Pseudotropical region known as the Brown Sea, he takes it over the only way he knows how—roughly, and under the guise of “philanthropy.” But merely possessing his own slice of offshore land isn’t enough; together with his algorithmically selected band of .01% elites, he elects to declare sovereignty and launch his very own country. It will be the deal of the century. What could possibly go wrong?
In the most elegant piss-take on the travel writing genre ever crafted, Swift’s hero traverses lands impossibly strange and, well, just impossible, giving satire a whole new modus operandus: expanding the cosmos!
Whenever I start to feel blue about living in an era that seems to underrate imaginativeness – especially in literature, I go back to Swift, who always reminds me that there is a path veering toward the limitless, and that path will never disappear.
'Thus, gentle Reader, I have given thee a faithful History of my Travels for Sixteen Years, and above Seven Months; wherein I have not been so studious of Ornament as of Truth.'
In these words Gulliver represents himself as a reliable reporter of the fantastic adventures he has just set down; but how far can we rely on a narrator whose identity is elusive and whoses inventiveness is self-evident? Gulliver's Travels purports to be a travel book, and describes Gulliver's encounters with the inhabitants of four extraordinary places: Lilliput, Brobdingnag, Laputa, and the country of the Houyhnhnms. A consummately skilful…
Why didn’t anyone think of it sooner? I’m guessing it took the excesses of the 1980s for a novelist to draw a direct connection between the psychopathic behavior of Wall Street traders and serial killing.
Greed and senseless violence are two vices that America seems to have something of a monopoly on, and this macabre tale, alternatively hilarious and disgusting, proves it.
Really hard to pick just one Pynchon for this list, as he is an all-around master of satire. But Inherent Vice is probably his LOL funniest, a stoner take on the detective genre set in the hippie world of 1970s southern California. The cinematic adaptation by Paul Thomas Anderson ain’t half bad, either.
Part noir, part psychedelic romp, all Thomas Pynchon-Private eye Doc Sportello surfaces, occasionally, out of a marijuana haze to watch the end of an era
In this lively yarn, Thomas Pynchon, working in an unaccustomed genre that is at once exciting and accessible, provides a classic illustration of the principle that if you can remember the sixties, you weren't there.
It's been a while since Doc Sportello has seen his ex- girlfriend. Suddenly she shows up with a story about a plot to kidnap a billionaire land developer whom she just happens to be in love with. It's the tail…
Giants defecating, fornicating, getting drunk, and having a gay old time – does literature get any better than this? The answer is no, of course.
The fact that it was written by a French monk in the sixteenth century boggles the mind even further – he certainly got into his fair share of trouble for this masterpiece of the bawdy and grotesque. The novel’s anti-authoritarian ethos, its celebration of the carnivalesque, was later discoursed upon by Mikhail Bakhtin in Rabelais and His World, one of the greatest works of literary criticism ever written.
If American Psycho is too bloody an evocation of hyper-capitalism for your stomach, try this tragically under-appreciated door-stopper of a novel, in which an eleven-year-old becomes a millionaire by playing the stock market. Written almost wholly in unattributed dialogue! As with Pynchon, everything written by Gaddis deserves to be on this list; alas, alas.
A National Book Award-winning satire about the unchecked power of American capitalism, written more than three decades before the 2008 financial crisis.
At the center of J R is J R Vansant, a very average sixth grader from Long Island with torn sneakers, a runny nose, and a juvenile fascination with junk-mail get-rich-quick offers. Responding to one, he sees a small return; soon, he is running a paper empire out of a phone booth in the school hallway. Everyone from the school staff to the municipal government to the squabbling heirs of a player-piano company to the titans of Wall…
One summer night in a small prairie city, 18-year-old Gabriel Reece accidentally outs himself to his redneck brother Colin, flees on his motorcycle, and gets struck by lightning on his way out of town.
He’s strangely fine, walking away from his melted pile of bike without a scratch. There’s no time to consider his new inhuman durability before his brother disappears and his childhood home burns down. He’s become popular, too—local cops and a weird private eye are after him, wanting to know if his brother is behind a recent murder.
On Friday, Gabriel Reece gets struck by lightning while riding his motorcycle.
It's not the worst thing that happens to him that week.
Gabe walks away from a smoldering pile of metal without a scratch-or any clothes, which seem to have been vaporized. And that's weird, but he's more worried about the sudden disappearance of his brother, Colin, who ditched town the second Gabe accidentally outed himself as gay.
Gabe tries to sift through fragmented memories of his crummy childhood for clues to his sudden invincibility, but he barely has time to think before people around town start turning up…
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