Clive Staples Lewis was a British writer and lay theologian. He held academic positions in English literature at both Oxford University and Cambridge University. He is best known for his works of fiction, especially The Screwtape Letters, The Chronicles of Narnia, and The Space Trilogy, and for his non-fiction Christian apologetics, such as Mere Christianity, Miracles, and The Problem of Pain.
Charles John Huffam Dickens was an English writer and social critic. He created some of the world's best-known fictional characters and is regarded by many as the greatest novelist of the Victorian era. His works enjoyed unprecedented popularity during his lifetime, and by the 20th century critics and scholars had recognised him as a literary genius. His novels and short stories are still widely read today.
Satire is a genre of literature, and sometimes graphic and performing arts, in which vices, follies, abuses, and shortcomings are held up to ridicule, ideally with the intent of shaming individuals, corporations, government, or society itself into improvement. Although satire is usually meant to be humorous, its greater purpose is often constructive social criticism, using wit to draw attention to both particular and wider issues in society.
Martin Louis Amis is a British novelist, essayist, memoirist, and screenwriter. His best-known novels are Money (1984) and London Fields (1989). He has received the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for his memoir Experience and has been listed for the Booker Prize twice to date. Amis served as the Professor of Creative Writing at the Centre for New Writing at the University of Manchester until 2011. In 2008, The Times named him one of the 50 greatest British writers since 1945.
Billy Martin, known professionally as Poppy Z. Brite, is an American author. He initially achieved notoriety in the gothic horror genre of literature in the early 1990s by publishing a string of successful novels and short story collections. His later work moved into the genre of dark comedy, with many stories set in the New Orleans restaurant world. Martin's novels are typically standalone books but may feature recurring characters from previous novels and short stories. Much of his work features openly bisexual and gay characters.
David Brooks is a Canadian-born center-right political and cultural commentator who writes for The New York Times. He has worked as a film critic for The Washington Times, a reporter and later op-ed editor for The Wall Street Journal, a senior editor at The Weekly Standard from its inception, a contributing editor at Newsweek, and The Atlantic Monthly, and a commentator on NPR and PBS NewsHour.
An editorial cartoon, also known as a political cartoon, is a drawing containing a commentary expressing the artist's opinion. An artist who writes and draws such images is known as an editorial cartoonist. They typically combine artistic skill, hyperbole and satire in order to question authority and draw attention to corruption, political violence and other social ills.
Paul Krassner is an American author, journalist, comedian, and the founder, editor and a frequent contributor to the freethought magazine The Realist, first published in 1958. Krassner became a key figure in the counterculture of the 1960s as a member of Ken Kesey's Merry Pranksters and a founding member of the Yippies.
Armando Giovanni Iannucci is a Scottish satirist, writer, director, and radio producer. Born in Glasgow to Italian parents, Iannucci studied at the University of Glasgow followed by the University of Oxford, leaving graduate work on a D.Phil about John Milton to pursue a career in comedy. Starting on BBC Scotland and BBC Radio 4, his early work with Chris Morris on the radio series On the Hour transferred to television as The Day Today. A character from this series, Alan Partridge, co-created by Iannucci, went on to feature in a number of Iannucci's television and radio programmes, including Knowing Me Knowing You with Alan Partridge and I'm Alan Partridge. Iannucci also fronted the satirical Armistice review shows and in 2001 created his most personal work, The Armando Iannucci Shows, for Channel 4.
A burlesque is a literary, dramatic or musical work intended to cause laughter by caricaturing the manner or spirit of serious works, or by ludicrous treatment of their subjects. The word derives from the Italian burlesco, which, in turn, is derived from the Italian burla – a joke, ridicule or mockery.
William Lewis Safir, better known as William Safire, was an American author, columnist, journalist, and presidential speechwriter.
David Salzer Broder, was an American journalist, writing for The Washington Post for over 40 years. He was also an author, television news show pundit, and university lecturer.
Martin James Kettle is a British journalist and author. The son of two prominent communist activists Arnold Kettle and Margot Kettle, Martin Kettle was educated at Leeds Modern School and Balliol College, Oxford University.
Canadian humour is an integral part of the Canadian Identity. There are several traditions in Canadian humour in both English and French. While these traditions are distinct and at times very different, there are common themes that relate to Canadians' shared history and geopolitical situation in North America and the world. Though neither universally kind nor moderate, humorous Canadian literature has often been branded by author Dick Bourgeois-Doyle as "gentle satire," evoking the notion embedded in humorist Stephen Leacock's definition of humour as "the kindly contemplation of the incongruities of life and the artistic expression thereof."
Michael Zezima is a writer, editor, blogger and novelist living in New York City. He writes a bimonthly column, "Mickey Z. Says", for VegNews magazine and he has also appeared on the C-SPAN network's Book TV program. He is also a regular contributor to Planet Green, ZNet, CounterPunch, OpEdNews, Animal Liberation Front, and other websites.
Robert Sean Wilentz is the Sidney and Ruth Lapidus Professor of the American Revolutionary Era at Princeton University, where he has taught since 1979. His primary research interests include U.S. social and political history in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He has written numerous award-winning books and articles including, most notably, The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln, which was awarded the Bancroft Prize and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.
Ross Andrew Fitzgerald is an Australian academic, historian, novelist, secularist, and political commentator. Fitzgerald is an Emeritus Professor in History and Politics at Griffith University. He has published forty books, including three histories of Queensland, two biographies, works about Labor Party politics of the 1950s, with other books relating to philosophy, alcohol and Australian Rules football, as well as eight works of fiction, including six political/sexual satires about his corpulent anti-hero Professor Dr Grafton Everest.
Ed Subitzky, full name Edward Jack Subitzky, is an American writer and artist, who is best known as a cartoonist, comics artist, and humorist/humor writer. He has also worked as a television comedy writer and performer, a writer and performer of radio comedy, and a writer of radio drama, as well as creating comedy and humor in various other media. He is a member of the Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, and the Writers Guild of America. He appears in the 2015 documentary film National Lampoon: Drunk Stoned Brilliant Dead, and was featured on one of the posters for the film.
Richard Conniff is an American non-fiction writer, specializing in human and animal behavior.
Ernest Bazanye is a Ugandan journalist, blogger, author, and scriptwriter. He is best known for his humour column Ernest Bazanye's Bad Idea, which ran in the Sunday Vision newspaper from 2004 to 2018. He is the author of three children's novels, and his short stories have appeared in literary magazines Eclectica, Kalahari Review, Soomanystories, and published in the Africa Book Club anthology.
