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As well as providing humorous reflections on the nature of scholarship and education, Swift seizes the opportunity to take swipes at several authors and critics. The result is a timeless and entertaining parody by one of the most enduringly popular writers in the English language.

The Decay of Lying sees Wilde explore his deepest preoccupations about the relationship between life and art, and examine the work of such writers as Shakespeare and Balzac.

A tongue-in-cheek manual on how servants should cope with the demands of their masters and perform their tasks in ways that will best satisfy their indolence, wastefulness and greed. It takes a caustic and irreverent look at master-servant relations.

Swift's The Benefit of Farting argues eloquently, in a forceful a posteriori fashion, that most of the distempers thought to affect the fairer sex are due to flatulences not adequately vented.

Inspired by Gogol's surreal tales, Dostoevsky's hilarious story has been interpreted by some as a vitriolic piece of social criticism and a veiled attack on the revolutionary philosopher Nikolai Chernyshevsky.

A playful look at nineteenth-century values and talking points, this dictionary will provide enduring entertainment and prove relevant even today.

Never published in its author's lifetime and intended solely for his own children, to whom he read it every Christmas, The Life of Our Lord is an accessible and gently humorous take on the life of Jesus Christ and his teachings.

This definitive collection of the world's rudest, lewdest limericks will perhaps finally bestow respectability upon stanzas long venerated in oral tradition. Most of them are bawdy, some are wickedly clever - all are guaranteed to raise a laugh.

Spurred by a lifelong fascination with the great emperor, French novelist Honore de Balzac set himself the painstaking task of collecting a selection of Napoleon's aphorisms from his public speeches and the gazettes of the time.

This short collection shows Chekhov in an amusing, playful light, poking fun at the greed, sycophancy and ignorance of his characters, with the moral detachment that also characterizes his major, serious works.