Satire
Story Stream
Lionel Shriver and the Resistance to Satire October 10, 2024
Of all the literary genres, satire is the most vexatious. Like Lionel Shriver herself, it is deliberately provocative. Likewise, it is adept at making enemies: Those with sensitive hides seem to resent having them flayed. In an age of media chaos, sa...
Clan of the Cave Bore October 09, 2024
Creation Lake is a novel that wants to be many contradictory things to many people all at the same time: It is a spy novel and a satire of a spy novel; a retro “novel of ideas” in a mid-20th-century style that’s also an absurdist postmodern novel of ...
Satire’s Trojan Horse June 21, 2024
Writer and professor Thelonious “Monk” Ellison has a successful yet dysfunctional Black family. So dysfunctional that after he’s chastised at an emergency faculty meeting for tormenting his undergraduate students by exposing them to a short story by ...
Kate Winslet Reigns June 13, 2024
In 2022, Kate Winslet went to the London home of director Stephen Frears to discuss HBO’s political satire “The Regime.”She’d been cast in the role of Elena Vernham, a narcissistic European autocrat, and Frears had been pinpointed by the production a...
Getting the New South Wrong June 11, 2024
Tom Wolfe was the only major American literary figure of his time with a reputation for conservatism. As academia, the college class in general, and the elite media particularly became precious, Wolfe became almost a figure of populism among our majo...
Beyond the Victimhood Grift March 13, 2024
The title and marketing of Andrew Boryga’s debut novel, Victim, promise a critique of the social-justice values that have come to predominate in works released by Big Five publishers. The book delivers that, plus something more. Victim is the story o...
'Napoleon' Has Something to Teach Viewers March 11, 2024
As awards season heats up in Hollywood, one highly anticipated blockbuster film of 2023 will face the disappointing reality of being less decorated than its eponymous 18th century-born Corsican military hero. With four wins (including two satirical “...
Pinochet’s Supernatural Staying Power March 08, 2024
“Why would I want to keep on living in a country where people hate me?” So says Augusto Pinochet, who, after two centuries of life as a vampire, has finally decided to die. The Oscar-nominated film El Conde, directed by Pablo Larraín, bitterly satiri...
On Adapting ‘American Psycho’ March 05, 2024
Bret Easton Ellis’s novel American Psycho was much reviled, much loathed when it was published in 1991. There was a big scandal and I was really surprised that in all the furor, no one said that the book was really funny. As well as being very violen...
How Universities Killed the Academic March 01, 2024
Po-faced poIs it possible to write a satirical campus novel anymore? Satire requires exaggeration and the pointed introduction of absurdity, but it is hard to see how modern university life could be further embellished in these respects. As usual, th...
Why Does No One Write Like Tom Wolfe Any More? December 29, 2023
Plenty of American writers from the second half of the 20th century still have their cults of personality. Thomas Pynchon has his shrines and shrine-keepers, Joan Didion has hers, and so on. In most cases the admiration has a canonising tendency, one...
PG Wodehouse Scoffed at Politics December 21, 2023
A certain kind of reader is unlikely to accept any kind of argument for P. G. Wodehouse’s Mike. Set in a private, all-boys school, the novel features a main character, the Mike of the title, with few distinguishing traits beyond being a good egg and ...
"The Book of Ayn" by Lexi Freiman December 18, 2023
An original and hilarious satire of both our political culture and those who rage against it, The Book of Ayn follows a writer from New York to Los Angeles to Lesbos as she searches for artistic and spiritual fulfillment in radical selfishness, altru...
Campus Castoffs December 11, 2023
You know that conservative challenges to the American model of higher education are making inroads when they are the target of a satirical campus novel. In How I Won a Nobel Prize, Julius Taranto presents an entertaining send-up of life and work at a...
The Best TV Shows of 2023 December 05, 2023
A lot has happened in the past 12 months of television: acclaimed series came to a close; nostalgic hits like Frasier and Party Down were revived; labor strikes shut down Hollywood, leading to many shows being delayed or outright canceled; the 2023 E...
The False Promise of Driverless Cars November 15, 2023
What’s going on underneath the hood of the self-driving car industry? According to Joanne McNeil, the tech critic behind a thrilling new industry satire, the harsh reality is a whole lot of “bizarre and usually non-functional technologies that don’t ...
Finding Bliss In Cancellation November 14, 2023
When Lexi Freiman sat down to write her second novel, she discovered an irresistible subject in Ayn Rand, the polarizing (albeit influential) Russian-American writer. “I'm always drawn to people who are sort of persona non grata, and she’s so despise...
