Audiobooks online: genre "Satire"

This second collection of essays by Mark Twain is a good example of the diversity of subject matter about which he wrote. As with the essays in Volume 1, many first appeared alone, in magazines or newspapers, before being printed as chapters of his larger works, while others were...

Jonathan Swift almost defines satire in this biting and brutal pamphlet in which he suggests that poor (Catholic) Irish families should fatten up their children and sell them to the rich (Protestant) land owners, thus solving the twin problems of starving children and poverty ...

In 1894, Oscar Wilde (1854 - 1900) published two collections of aphorisms: A Few Maxims For The Instruction Of The Over-Educated, in the Saturday Review newspaper, and Phrases and Philosophies for the Use of the Young, in the Oxford student magazine The C...

Fifth novel in the Barsetshire series, The Small House at Allington is largely focused on the Small House's inhabitants, Mrs. Dale and her two marriageable daughters, Lily and Bell. The two girls, of course, have suitors: their cousin, Bernard Dale, his friend Adolphus Crosbie, a...

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 opinion of the human race, and in fact they pride themselves in the depths of their detestation. Others of its denizens believe the ultim...

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...

The five-volume work chronicling the adventures of father Gargantua and son Pantagruel is a vehicle for Rabelais' satire of sixteenth-century European society. It is lively, outrageous, and, at times, bawdy. This the third of the five volumes--all are translated by Thomas Urquhar...

This play, which is neither a comedy or a farce but has elements in common with each, was first performed in 1668 at Paris, and afterwards at Versailles. It is a French adaptation of "The Wasps" of Aristophanes. Racine's own experience of law and lawyers was derived from the sui...

Old Martin Chuzzlewit has heaps of money that has never brought him anything but misery. Estranged from his grandson and namesake, when word gets out that he is ill, he finds himself surrounded by a throng of relatives that he despises, all hoping to get a piece of the pie. He...

Arms and the Man is a comedy written by George Bernard Shaw, and was first produced in 1894 and published in 1898, and has become one of the most popular of his plays. Like his other works, Arms and the Man questions conventional values and uses war and love as his satirical tar...

First published in 1917, The Glugs of Gosh satirizes Australian life at the start of the twentieth century - but the absurdities it catalogs seem just as prevalent at the start of the twenty-first. The foolishness of kings, the arrogance of the elite, the gullibility of crowds, t...

Subtitled "The Way to Win Him:, this play is placed in Paris - a change from many others of Farquhar's plays which used English settings - though still presented to the same English audience. "This comedy ... had a reception, on the first night of its appearance, far inferior to ...