Audiobooks online: genre "Satire", page 9

The Expedition of Humphry Clinker was the last of the picaresque novels of Tobias Smollett, and is considered by many to be his best and funniest work.Published in London on 17 June 1771, it is an epistolary novel, presented in the form of letters written by six different char...

Tom Thumb, small of stature, great of heart. This play was written as a parody of the tragic heroic biography of a great man, filled with biting satire as to people and events of the time. Note as warned by the title that this is not a happy-ending fairy tale. (Follow the etext l...

A. A. MILNE: …was best known for the perennially popular Pooh (Winnie the), arguably one of his lesser contributions to the literature of his day. He was highly acclaimed for dozens of popular plays. Moreover, he was both a contributor to and editor of Britain’s famous Punch M...

"What Is Man?", published by Mark Twain in 1906, is a dialogue between a young man and an older man jaded to the world. It involves ideas of destiny and free will, as well as of psychological egoism. The Old Man asserted that the human being is merely a machine, and nothing more....

Come and hear the strange tail of The Boss Hank Morgan, a modern day (at the time of publication) Connecticut Yankee who inexplicably finds himself transported to the court of the legendary King Arthur (as the title of the book implies). Hank, or simply, The Boss, as he comes ...

Don Juan "contains, perhaps, more severe attacks upon hypocrisy than does even Tartuffe. It depicts the hero as a man who, rich, noble, powerful, and bold, respects neither heaven nor earth, and knows no bounds to the gratification of his desires or his passions. He has excellent...

Donne’s Style In John Donne’s day, a satire was such a poem as a satyr might compose. Satyrs were rough, savage creatures in Greek mythology, human to the waist but goat from there down. That is the reason that Donne’s style in these poems exceeds his normal difficulty in s...

The setup here is that Moliere and his troupe have been sent for by the King to come perform at Versailles. But instead of the piece they had prepared, the King has just asked for an entirely new piece - to be ready later that same day! So all the action of the play takes place b...

It's a cold and foggy night in London. A man is horribly murdered in his bedroom, the door locked and bolted on the inside. Scotland Yard is stumped. Yet the seemingly unsolvable case has, as Inspector Grodman says, "one sublimely simple solution" that is revealed in a final c...

Dating back to the 6th century BC, Aesop's Fables tell universal truths through the use of simple allegories that are easily understood. Though almost nothing is known of Aesop himself, and some scholars question whether he existed at all, these stories stand as timeless class...

The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today is an 1873 novel by Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner that satirizes greed and political corruption in post-Civil War America. The term gilded age, commonly given to the era, comes from the title of this book. Twain and Warner g...

This stage adaptation of Dickens’ novel debuted in November of 1838 at the Adelphi Theater in London. Only eight installments of the story had been published at that time, therefore several characters such as the theatrical Crummles family who play an important part in the latte...