Satire (genre)

This country needs a Swift kick to the behind in 2013 — a Jonathan Swift kick to the behind. Swift, the greatest satirist ever, has been dead for more than 250 years, but he would have great fodder in the United States of America as it stands...

“Crayons, pencil, gun” -- an opinion piece in Friday’s Times -- hit the mark.  In his Op-Ed article, Daniel Akst wrote: “For some reason nobody in this country is willing to admit the obvious, which is that the poor helpless kids...

In 2010, before I visited my late father's native village in China's central province of Henan, a friend recommended that I read Yan Lianke's books to prepare for my trip. Yan, one of China's eminent and most controversial novelists and satirists —...

Now that the election is really (really) over, the producers of Laffing Matterz can finalize their dinner-theater show. The revue opens its seventh season Thursday, Nov. 15, in the Abdo New River Room at the Broward Center for the Performing Arts with...

Now that the election is really (really) over, the producers of “Laffing Matterz” can finalize their dinner theater show. The musical comedy revue opens its seventh season tonight in the Abdo New River Room in the Broward Center for the...

Hilariously dark comedian Bobcat Goldthwait (pictured) performs at the Funny Bone Comedy Club in Manchester Nov. 9. Goldthwait, who burst on the scene in the '80s as a solo comedian with his over-the-top antics and political satire, made his movie debut...

When Mary Shelley wrote "Frankenstein" in 1816, she could not have conceived of the cultural landmark it would become. The novel still throws a long shadow across the popular imagination almost two centuries later. Boris Karloff's performance as the...

The masters of the universe in Tom Wolfe's "Back to Blood" don't resemble their counterparts in the writer's other novels. Their voices are louder, their wardrobes are looser, their brows are sweatier and their accents are funnier than the almighty,...

-------------------- Back to Blood A Novel Tom Wolfe Little, Brown: 704 pp., $30 -------------------- About a quarter of the way through Tom Wolfe's new novel, "Back to Blood," pornography addiction specialist Dr. Norman Lewis waits with his nurse...

It's a cold, gray Friday afternoon in a dark and drafty concrete warehouse at an industrial park in Columbia. Not exactly the setting in which anyone would expect to find glamour, wit or the next big thing in pop culture. But through a series of doors...

For more than two decades after that awful February day in 1989, when Iran's Ayatollah Khomeini asked Muslims everywhere to kill Salman Rushdie for allegedly offending Islam with his novel “The Satanic Verses,” the author was never sure that...

-------------------- Fobbit A Novel David Abrams Black Cat: 372 pp., $15 paper -------------------- In "Going After Cacciato," Tim O'Brien's brilliantly inventive 1978 novel, the title character seeks to escape the madness of 20th-century warfare...