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Without doubt our greatest satirist, elegant, honorable, learned and fair. I love reading him.
Lewis Lapham—born of Mark Twain and H.L. Mencken—is the most provocative and engaging essayist in the country.
One of the last liberal thinkers, a man of elegant humor. Should he wander onto the premises of Fox TV, he’d surely be shot down like a dog.
Lapham’s indignation is ecumenical, his scorn spread as smoothly as butter from left to right and north to south across the face of contemporary America.
30 Satires
paperback
$15.95 / £8.99
–Vanity Fair
Widely celebrated for his political essays, Lewis Lapham is a satirist who belongs in the company of Ambrose Bierce, H.L. Mencken, and Mark Twain. Over the last twenty years he has experimented with satire in its several forms—as burlesque, pasquinade, invective, and deadpan jest.
This first assemblage of Lapham’s satires presents thirty pieces that hold their currency and humor against the tide of social and political change that has engulfed American society in recent times. He reduces to absurdity many of the topics of the day that are often treated portentiously: Dickens’s A Christmas Carol is retold to praise the virtues of remorseless greed; the hydrogen bomb is introduced as a solemn dinner guest who doesn’t play tennis or speak English; gene banks take the form of well-trained pigs that accompany their wealthy owners in the first-class cabins of transatlantic jets.
Lewis Lapham is the editor of Harper’s Magazine and the author of several books, including Gag Rule, Theater of War (The New Press), Money and Class in America, Hotel America, The Wish for Kings, and The Agony of Mammon. He lives in New York City.
Spring 2005
paperback
5 1/4 x 7 1/2, 272 pages
978-1-56584-986-0
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