Satire and Sorrow in Lars Iyers’ “My Weil” – Chicago Review of Books

Satire and Sorrow in Lars Iyers’ “My Weil” – Chicago Review of Books

[ad_1] Ontological evil; the madness of evil or the evil of madness. This is the topic around which Johnny has centered his doctoral degree in Disaster Studies at All Saints University in Manchester, England. Raised in a children’s home, Johnny registers as more psychologically fragile (or maybe just more earnestly human) than the rest of … Read more

A Satire of Russian Life in Alisa Ganieva’s “Offended Sensibilities” – Chicago Review of Books

A Satire of Russian Life in Alisa Ganieva’s “Offended Sensibilities” – Chicago Review of Books

[ad_1] Vladimir Sorokin’s Day of the Oprichnik imagines a near-future dystopia in which a wall separates Russia from the rest of the world and the old Tsarist autocracy has been restored, complete with Ivan the Terrible’s Oprichnina, a sixteenth-century forerunner of the secret police. Sorokin’s novel, which was translated by Jamey Gambrell, envisions a Russian … Read more

Satire and Superfluity in “The Swells” – Chicago Review of Books

Satire and Superfluity in “The Swells” – Chicago Review of Books

[ad_1] Among the most ancient and revered forms, which the amorphous siren known as prose may assume, is that of satire, used for millennia to critique, to side-eye and expose, to lay bare the ills of society in narrative or verse. From The Frogs of Aristophanes to Voltaire’s Candide, from James Joyce to Larry David, … Read more