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Anacharsis or Athletics. Menippus or The Descent into Hades. On Funerals. A Professor of Public Speaking. Alexander the False Prophet. Essays in Portraiture. Essays in Portraiture Defended. The Goddesse of Surrye
Lucian
Harvard University Press

Antiquity’s satirist supreme.

Lucian (ca. AD 120–190), the satirist from Samosata on the Euphrates, started as an apprentice sculptor, turned to rhetoric and visited Italy and Gaul as a successful traveling lecturer before settling in Athens and developing his original brand of satire. Late in life he fell on hard times and accepted an official post in Egypt.

Although notable for the Attic purity and elegance of his Greek and his literary versatility, Lucian is chiefly famed for the lively, cynical wit of the humorous dialogues in which he satirizes human folly, superstition, and hypocrisy. His aim was to amuse rather than to instruct. Among his best works are A True Story (the tallest of tall tales about a voyage to the moon), Dialogues of the Gods (a "reductio ad absurdum" of traditional mythology), Dialogues of the Dead (on the vanity of human wishes), Philosophies for Sale (great philosophers of the past are auctioned off as slaves), The Fisherman (the degeneracy of modern philosophers), The Carousal or Symposium (philosophers misbehave at a party), Timon (the problems of being rich), Twice Accused (Lucian's defense of his literary career) and (if by Lucian) The Ass (the amusing adventures of a man who is turned into an ass).

The Loeb Classical Library edition of Lucian is in eight volumes.

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The Funerals
A Novel of the Algerian Civil War
Rashid Boudjedra
Haus Publishing, 2015
Algiers, 1955. It is in the midst of civil war, and we meet Sarah, who joins an anti-terrorism unit. There, she meets Salim, a forensic scientist. They embark on a passionate affair, facing the horror of terrorist attacks alongside their own wild impulses. Together, they learn who is to blame for the carnage at a local school. The perpetrators are the same people who tore an eleven-year-old girl from her class before beating, raping, and killing her. The assassins even dare to attend the funeral of a boy shot in the school’s courtyard while he was cleaning the blackboard. But as Sarah and Salim discover, none in the community are willing to speak out or denounce the killers, as doing so would only put their own lives at risk.

Full of suspense and drama, The Funerals takes readers behind the madness of civil war and shows how in times like these, some might attack their victims to feel a little less alone—perhaps even a little more human.
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Reel Rituals
Ritual Occasions from Baptisms to Funerals in Hollywood Films, 1945-1995
Parley Ann Boswell and Paul Loukides
University of Wisconsin Press, 1999
Ritual occasions in the movies can bring us to laughter and tears and hope and regret; the chords they strike suggest the complex intersection between American movies and our lives. Major ritual occasions of weddings, baptisms, bar mitzvahs, funerals, graduations, and birthday parties appear in hundreds of popular films produced by Hollywood throughout the 20th century. This study suggests that these stock scenes are more significant to American film than we might have thought.
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