All posts tagged: Satire

The Publishing Satire That Bites Back

The Publishing Satire That Bites Back

Published by Jenni Sidey

Somewhere on Reddit there is a post explaining how to write a bestseller. Follow the trends, it advises. Dark is good. Sad sells. And the gold dust, the guaranteed prize-winner? Gay and sad together. Josh Silver’s adult debut, Fruit Fly, takes that advice literally, hands it to the worst possible person, and lets us watch what it costs. Fruit Fly by Josh Silver introduces Mallory Maddox, a one-hit novelist seven years past her moment, hiding in the bathroom at her own party playing Candy Crush while her husband soaks up the adoration downstairs. She has no second book, three counselling clients she is barely qualified to see, and a marriage that looks enviable from every angle except the inside. What she needs is a story. What she finds, on an app she downloads for research, is Leo: twenty-two, homeless, addicted, funny as an open wound, and exactly the kind of raw material the market is paying for. A Bestseller Recipe Written in Someone Else’s Blood The premise sits in obvious conversation with Yellowface, but Silver …

The Quantity Theory of Morality by Will Self review – raucously inventive state-of-the-nation satire

The Quantity Theory of Morality by Will Self review – raucously inventive state-of-the-nation satire

Published by Sam Flores

In Will Self’s 1991 debut collection The Quantity Theory of Insanity, an art therapist named Misha Gurney finds himself involuntarily sectioned in the psychiatric hospital where he is employed. In the title story, Misha’s father is revealed as a friend and early associate of the hospital’s chief psychiatrist Zack Busner, a recurring character in Self’s fiction until the present day. In his first incarnation, Busner is engaged in testing the titular theory, by whose metric “the surface of the collective psyche was like the worn, stripy ticking of an old mattress. If you punched into its coiled hide at any point, another part would spring up – there was no action without reaction, no laughter without tears, no normality without its pissing accompanist.” Outlandish? Maybe not. However plausible or implausible the theory itself, The Quantity Theory of Insanity was an enthralling work, the announcement of a talent that has continued to reinvent the concept of narrative fiction even as it gloomily advertises its demise. Thirty-five years on, Self augments his earlier hypothesis with The Quantity Theory of …

A Surreal Satire of Academia and Belonging

A Surreal Satire of Academia and Belonging

Published by Miika Tikkanen

Mona Awad’s “Bunny” is a fever dream disguised as a campus novel—a mesmerizing, hallucinatory journey through the looking glass of elite academia that leaves readers questioning the boundaries between reality and fantasy. Published in 2019, this sophomore effort from the author of “13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl” is equal parts savage social satire, psychological horror, and heartbreaking exploration of loneliness and belonging. As I turned the final page, I found myself in that rare, stunned silence that only truly disorienting literature can produce—unsure if I’d just witnessed a masterpiece or a beautiful catastrophe. Perhaps it’s both, and therein lies its brilliance. The Warren University Nightmare The novel follows Samantha Heather Mackey, our sardonic, isolated narrator who finds herself adrift in the painfully pretentious world of Warren University’s MFA program. As an outsider—a scholarship student with dark sensibilities—Samantha is repelled by her fiction cohort: four wealthy, saccharine girls who call each other “Bunny” and seem to move, speak, and think as one hyper-feminine hive mind. Awad masterfully establishes this dynamic in the novel’s …