Ambrose Bierce was a well-known and highly admired journalist, short story writer, and satirist. After distinguished Civil War service, Bierce became a journalist, and in 1887 he became a columnist for William Randolph Hearst’s Sunday Examiner. His work for the San Francisco Examiner made his reputation, especially on the West Coast. In 1914 he vanished on a trip to Mexico.

The work for which he is best know, The Devil’s Dictionary, was first published in 1906. Bierce also published volumes of short stories. His Tales of Soldiers and Civilians (1891) represents some of the finest writing to come out of the Civil War. Bierce’s stories of the supernatural, collected in Can Such Things Be? (1893), established him as one of the leading American authors of supernatural fiction.

This volume gathers together for the first time the 850 fables written by Bierce over his forty-year career, including more than 400 fables never reprinted from the magazines and newspapers in which they originally appeared.

Bierce’s fables are distinguished for their biting wit and their cynical reflection of the political and social events of his time. Local and national political figures; corrupt lawyers, judges, and clergymen; and even incidents in the Spanish-American War are all mercilessly lampooned. The fables not only testify to Bierce’s hatred of “hypocrisy, cant, and all sham” but provide a window into late nineteenth-century American society. S. T. Joshi has provided extensive commentary explaining historical and literary references in the fables.

A shotgun marriage of fact and fiction by one of the most highly regarded writers and teachers of our time

A writer named George Garrett, suffering from double vision as a result of a neurological disorder, is asked to review a recent, first biography of the late Peter Taylor, a renowned writer who has been his long-time friend and neighbor in Charlottesville. Reflecting on their relationship, Garrett conceives of a character—not unlike himself—a writer in his early 70s, ill and suffering from double vision, named Frank Toomer. He gives Toomer a neighbor, a distinguished short story writer named Aubrey Carver.

As the real George Garrett and Peter Taylor are replaced by two very different and imaginary writers, the story becomes a wise and insightful exploration of American literary life, the art of biography, the comical rivalries among writers and academics, notions of success, and the knotty relationship of art to life, fact to fiction, and life to death. Double Vision is a witty tour de force and an elegy for a gifted generation of writers.
 

Satire, the use of criticism cloaked in wit, has been employed since classical times to challenge the established order of society. In colonial Spanish America during the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries, many writers used satire to resist Spanish-imposed social and literary forms and find an authentic Latin American voice. This study explores the work of eight satirists of the colonial period and shows how their literary innovations had a formative influence on the development of the modern Latin American novel, essay, and autobiography.

The writers studied here include Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Juan del Valle y Caviedes, Cristóbal de Llerena, and Eugenio Espejo. Johnson chronicles how they used satire to challenge the "New World as Utopia" myth propagated by Spanish authorities and criticize the Catholic church for its role in fulfilling imperialistic designs. She also shows how their marginalized status as Creoles without the rights and privileges of their Spanish heritage made them effective satirists. From their writings, she asserts, emerges the first self-awareness and national consciousness of Spanish America.

By linking the two great periods of Latin American literarure—the colonial writers and the modern generation—Satire in Colonial Spanish America makes an important contribution to Latin American literature and culture studies. It will also be of interest to all literary scholars who study satire.

Virtually all theories of satire define it as a criticism of contemporary society. Some argue that satire criticizes the present in favor of a standard of values that has been superseded, and thus that satire is generally backward-looking and conservative. While this is often true of poetic satire, in this study Frank Palmeri asserts that narrative satire performs a different function, that it parodies both the established view of the world and that of its opponents, offering its own distinctive critical perspective.

This theory of satire builds on the idea of dialogical parody in the work of Russian theorist Mikhail Bakhtin, while revising Bakhtin's estimate of carnival. In Palmeri's view, the carnivalesque offers only an inverted mirror image of authoritative discourse, while parodic narrative satire suggests an alternative to both the official world and its inverted opposite.

Palmeri applies this theory of narrative satire to five works of world literature, each of which has generated sharp controversy about the genre to which it rightly belongs: Petronius' Satyricon, Jonathan Swift's A Tale of a Tub, Edward Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Herman Melville's The Confidence-Man, and Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49. He analyzes the features that link these works and shows how the changing pairs of alternatives that are parodied in these satires reflect changes in the terms of social and cultural oppositions.

Satire in Narrative will appeal to comparatists, specialists in eighteenth-century and American literature, and others interested in theories of genre and the relations between literary forms and social history.

Both an exorcism of contemporary academia and a comedic portrait of an artist seeking the means to survive.

At once angry and jubilant, Ray Levy’s School is a curse on a dying system and an incantation for transforming pain into a vessel for capacious, creative selfhood.

A dissertation manuscript possessed by the spirit of Marquis de Sade; a lecture on psychoanalysis delivered as stand-up comedy by a dysphoric graduate student; a review of a found-footage horror movie that’s also a YouTube video of a conference presentation on French theory; an interview with an avant-garde filmmaker that’s really an invocation for conjuring your demon brother; oversharing and withholding, chanting and channeling, School is a slapstick roast of Derrida’s corpse and a mystical vision of a life in which you have not lost.