Writer, novelist and co-founder of the Bay Area Trans Writers Workshop, Jackie Ess picks satire, and five books that question power and institutions through ridicule.
Odile by Raymond Queneau
I loved this when I was 20 and read it again in response to this prompt. A mathematician on a romp through something like the surrealist circle. The depictions of crackpottery and backbiting and ungrounded politics made me feel, for a moment, sane.
The Satires by Juvenal
Quite nasty at times, but that’s how it was in the bully-boy ancient world. They were all mad. Now history has come to its senses, but possibly at the cost of fun? One breathes fresh air here, though I wouldn’t want to stay for more than an hour.
Sixty Stories by Donald Barthelme
Barthelme often threatens to tip over into the kind of satire I was warning against. What is amazing are the moments when he rights himself, this centring reappropriation of his own story.
Dark Back of Time by Javier Marías
Marías is confronted by everyone who dreams they’ve been written about by him, counterfeits an island nation, and becomes its king in the real world.
- Rumours review – an absurdist satire of the G7 summit that should make us all a bit afraid
- American Fiction review – a satirical take on novel writing with Jeffrey Wright
Operation Shylock by Philip Roth
Roth at his most self-indulgent, which is saying something, and at his best, which is saying something, in pursuit of a Philip Roth impersonator, who is advancing bizarre political theories under his own name.
