{"title":"Satire Bites","description":"\u003cp\u003eAbsurdist fiction that punctures power. Novels where the joke is on the system i.e. war, capitalism, media, fascism; and laughter becomes a way to see through the madness.a\u003c\/p\u003e","products":[{"product_id":"trust-me-i-m-lying","title":"Trust Me, I’m Lying","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cmeta charset=\"utf-8\"\u003eHoliday confesses his sins as a digital spin doctor, revealing how outrage, clickbait, and fake news built the modern attention economy. It’s a field guide to our post-truth landscape — equal parts mea culpa and manual for media literacy. Read it to learn how the sausage gets made… and why it’s still trending.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Punk and Pedagogy","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":45154490712262,"sku":null,"price":20.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0706\/9066\/8742\/files\/trust-me-im-lying.webp?v=1761505250"},{"product_id":"the-sellout","title":"The Sellout","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cmeta charset=\"utf-8\"\u003eBeatty detonates every taboo in sight, using humor sharper than a straight razor to dissect race, identity, and American delusion. It’s savage, brilliant, and fearless — the rare satire that doesn’t just mock injustice but wrestles it to the ground and makes it tell the truth.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Punk and Pedagogy","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":45154490777798,"sku":null,"price":18.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0706\/9066\/8742\/files\/the-sellout.jpg?v=1761505253"},{"product_id":"white-noise","title":"White Noise","description":"\u003cp data-start=\"1004\" data-end=\"1303\"\u003eDeLillo’s suburban satire captures the hum of American dread beneath the buzz of TV static. It’s a novel about fear of death, the comfort of distraction, and the hypnosis of mass culture. Bleakly hilarious and eerily prophetic, \u003cem data-start=\"1232\" data-end=\"1245\"\u003eWhite Noise\u003c\/em\u003e is the sound of civilization scrolling itself to sleep.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Punk and Pedagogy","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":45154490908870,"sku":null,"price":18.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0706\/9066\/8742\/files\/white-noise.webp?v=1761505256"},{"product_id":"slaughterhouse-five","title":"Slaughterhouse-Five","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cmeta charset=\"utf-8\"\u003eVonnegut’s anti-war novel bends time, space, and sanity to tell the only kind of truth trauma can handle — a fragmented one. Billy Pilgrim becomes unstuck in time, witnessing the Dresden bombing and human absurdity from every angle. Equal parts sci-fi and elegy, it’s black humor as survival instinct.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Punk and Pedagogy","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":45154490941638,"sku":null,"price":9.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0706\/9066\/8742\/files\/slaughterhouse-five.webp?v=1761505258"},{"product_id":"catch-22","title":"Catch-22","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cmeta charset=\"utf-8\"\u003eHeller’s masterpiece turns military madness into perfect logic: you can’t escape the war because wanting to escape it means you’re sane enough to fight it. A circular scream disguised as comedy, \u003cem data-start=\"446\" data-end=\"456\"\u003eCatch-22\u003c\/em\u003e captures the lunacy of power and the futility of reason in a world built on contradiction.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Golden Hour Books","offers":[{"title":"Default","offer_id":45767754285254,"sku":null,"price":19.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true},{"title":"Used Copy","offer_id":45767754318022,"sku":null,"price":6.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0706\/9066\/8742\/files\/catch-22.webp?v=1761505258"},{"product_id":"the-white-boy-shuffle","title":"The White Boy Shuffle","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cmeta charset=\"utf-8\"\u003e\u003cspan\u003eGunnar Kaufman is a Black surfer kid from Santa Monica who gets transplanted to the 'hood and accidentally becomes a poet and then a prophet — which he finds deeply stupid. Beatty's debut is a tour de force of satirical energy, laying waste to Black respectability politics, white liberal guilt, and the whole concept of the charismatic leader. Furious and hilarious in equal measure.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Punk and Pedagogy","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":45620301693126,"sku":null,"price":19.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0706\/9066\/8742\/files\/the-white-boy-shuffle.jpg?v=1773344000"},{"product_id":"look-whos-back","title":"Look Who's Back","description":"\u003cdiv class=\"field\"\u003e\n\u003cdiv class=\"field-value\"\u003eAdolf Hitler wakes up in a Berlin park in 2011 with no memory of how he got there. He assumes the war is still ongoing. Everyone around him assumes he is a method actor or a comedian. He gets a TV show. He goes viral. Vermes wrote this German bestseller as a satire so uncomfortable it made readers laugh and then immediately feel terrible about laughing — which is exactly the point. The novel's most devastating argument is not that people are stupid but that the media ecosystem of the 21st century would amplify a charismatic authoritarian without anyone stopping to ask whether they should. Funnier and more chilling than it has any right to be simultaneously.\u003c\/div\u003e\n\u003c\/div\u003e","brand":"Punk and Pedagogy","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":45728556712134,"sku":null,"price":14.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0706\/9066\/8742\/files\/look-whos-back.webp?v=1776314708"},{"product_id":"yesteryear","title":"Yesteryear","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cmeta charset=\"utf-8\"\u003eNatalie Heller Mills is a tradwife influencer — the curated sourdough, the modest dresses, the performance of wifely devotion — who wakes up in 1855 and discovers that the past she has been selling to her followers is a nightmare she cannot filter or edit or log off from. Burke's debut is wickedly precise about the gap between the aesthetic of tradition and its reality: the actual labor, the actual powerlessness, the actual bodies of women in a world that didn't pretend to offer them choices. A social satire, a thriller, and a dark comedy simultaneously. The most timely novel on the Laugh \u0026amp; Resist shelf — a book that lets the tradwife fantasy encounter itself and finds out exactly what it was always selling.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Punk and Pedagogy","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":45746763825350,"sku":null,"price":30.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0706\/9066\/8742\/files\/yesteryear.webp?v=1776706474"},{"product_id":"a-modest-proposal","title":"A Modest Proposal","description":"\u003cdiv class=\"field\"\u003e\n\u003cdiv class=\"field-value\"\u003eSwift published this in 1729 in the flat, reasonable tone of a policy document: a practical solution to Irish poverty in which the poor sell their babies as food to the English rich, with careful calculations of cost per pound and suggestions for preparation. The English establishment banned it. Swift was threatened. The pamphlet is ten pages long and contains the complete instruction manual for political satire — how the adoption of the enemy's own language and logic, pushed to its conclusion, exposes that logic more completely than any direct attack could. Every satirist from Voltaire to Vonnegut to the writers of Look Who's Back and Yesteryear on this shelf learned something from how this works. The foundational text for teaching children to make satirical work — not because it is old and canonical but because it is perfect, and perfection in craft is the best possible teacher. The most economical punk act in the catalog: ten pages, one argument, four hundred years of influence.\u003c\/div\u003e\n\u003c\/div\u003e","brand":"Punk and Pedagogy","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":45827283419334,"sku":null,"price":9.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0706\/9066\/8742\/files\/a-modest-proposal.jpg?v=1778166257"},{"product_id":"revolution-for-the-hell-of-it","title":"Revolution for the Hell of It","description":"\u003cdiv class=\"field\"\u003e\n\u003cdiv class=\"field-value\"\u003eHoffman and the Yippies threw dollar bills onto the floor of the New York Stock Exchange and watched the traders scramble. They nominated a pig named Pigasus for president. They attempted to levitate the Pentagon through collective meditation. They understood something that most political movements miss: that a system which takes itself completely seriously can be disrupted most effectively by refusing to take it seriously at all — that absurdity is a weapon, that joy is a tactic, that making the revolution something people actually want to be part of is not a distraction from the politics but the politics itself. Published in 1968, the year everything was happening, written under the pseudonym Free. The most complete expression of Yippie politics and the most direct ancestor of everything in the Laugh \u0026amp; Resist arc — the argument that defiance should be fun, that the refusal to be grim in the face of power is itself an act of resistance. Rules for Radicals tells you how to build power seriously. Revolution for the Hell of It tells you why serious isn't always the right register.\u003c\/div\u003e\n\u003c\/div\u003e","brand":"Punk and Pedagogy","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":45827363504326,"sku":null,"price":21.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0706\/9066\/8742\/files\/revolution-for-the-hell-of-it.webp?v=1778171018"},{"product_id":"candide","title":"Candide","description":"\u003cdiv class=\"field\"\u003e\n\u003cdiv class=\"field-value\"\u003eVoltaire sent his naive hero Candide through war, earthquake, the Inquisition, slavery, and massacre — and gave him a tutor who keeps insisting, through all of it, that this is the best of all possible worlds. Published in 1759 and banned immediately by the Geneva city council, the book is a direct attack on the philosophical position that suffering is part of a divine plan and therefore acceptable. The form is the weapon: Voltaire adopts the cheerful optimism he is destroying and follows it to its logical conclusion until it collapses under the weight of the bodies. The foundational text of political satire in prose fiction — the ancestor of everything from A Modest Proposal to Cat's Cradle to Look Who's Back on this shelf. Everything that came after it in the satirical tradition owes it a debt.\u003c\/div\u003e\n\u003c\/div\u003e","brand":"Punk and Pedagogy","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":45827925770438,"sku":null,"price":17.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0706\/9066\/8742\/files\/candide.webp?v=1778190761"},{"product_id":"the-good-soldier-svejk","title":"The Good Soldier Švejk","description":"\u003cdiv class=\"field\"\u003e\n\u003cdiv class=\"field-value\"\u003eŠvejk is a Czech dog trader conscripted into the Austro-Hungarian army during WWI who navigates the entire military bureaucracy through cheerful compliance and spectacular incompetence that may or may not be deliberate. He does exactly what he's told. He follows every order to its logical conclusion. The results are catastrophic for the Austro-Hungarian war effort and entirely innocent on Švejk's part — or so he maintains. Hašek was a Czech anarchist who wrote this while dying of alcoholism, left it unfinished at his death in 1923, and produced the most important Czech novel ever written. The most sophisticated expression in literature of resistance through strategic stupidity — the appearance of compliance as the most effective form of subversion. The essential companion to Revolution for the Hell of It: Hoffman disrupts with joy, Švejk disrupts with obedience.\u003c\/div\u003e\n\u003c\/div\u003e","brand":"Punk and Pedagogy","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":45827929866438,"sku":null,"price":22.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0706\/9066\/8742\/files\/the-good-soldier-svejk.jpg?v=1778191182"},{"product_id":"the-hitchhikers-guide-to-the-galaxy","title":"The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy","description":"\u003cdiv class=\"field\"\u003e\n\u003cdiv class=\"field-value\"\u003eEarth is demolished to make way for a hyperspace bypass. Arthur Dent, rescued from the rubble in his dressing gown by his alien friend Ford Prefect, hitchhikes across the universe and discovers that it is indifferent, bureaucratic, and organized on principles that have nothing to do with human comfort or significance. The answer to life, the universe, and everything is 42. Adams uses science fiction comedy to make Vonnegut's argument about meaninglessness more accessible and more fun — the universe doesn't care, which is terrifying, and also the funniest thing that has ever happened. The most important gateway drug to the absurdist tradition for teenage readers and the book that most clearly shows that taking the universe's indifference seriously is not a cause for despair but for a very specific kind of liberation.\u003c\/div\u003e\n\u003c\/div\u003e","brand":"Punk and Pedagogy","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":45827974004934,"sku":null,"price":9.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0706\/9066\/8742\/files\/the-hitchhiker-s-guide-to-the-galaxy.webp?v=1778193424"},{"product_id":"a-confederacy-of-dunces","title":"A Confederacy of Dunces","description":"\u003cdiv class=\"field\"\u003e\n\u003cdiv class=\"field-value\"\u003eIgnatius J. Reilly is the most magnificently impossible protagonist in American fiction — a medieval scholar living with his mother in New Orleans, writing his philosophical magnum opus in a Big Chief notebook, catastrophically employed as a hot dog vendor and department store worker, at total war with modernity in all its forms. Toole submitted the novel repeatedly, was rejected everywhere, and died by suicide at 31. His mother spent years getting it published posthumously. It won the Pulitzer Prize. The biography is inseparable from the book — a novel about a man the world refused to take seriously, championed by a mother who refused to let it disappear, finally recognized as a masterpiece. The most complete comic portrait of the man who refuses every available category and suffers magnificently for it. New Orleans as a specific place with specific people, rendered with love and exasperation in equal measure.\u003c\/div\u003e\n\u003c\/div\u003e","brand":"Punk and Pedagogy","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":45827974758598,"sku":null,"price":17.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0706\/9066\/8742\/files\/a-confederacy-of-dunces.webp?v=1778193524"},{"product_id":"devil-on-the-cross","title":"Devil on the Cross","description":"\u003cdiv class=\"field\"\u003e\n\u003cdiv class=\"field-value\"\u003eNgũgĩ wrote this novel in secret on toilet paper while imprisoned without charge by the Kenyan government in 1977-78 — and wrote it in Gĩkũyũ rather than English as a deliberate act of linguistic decolonization, insisting that African literature belonged to African languages rather than to the colonizer's tongue. The novel is a satirical feast: a competition of thieves and robbers arguing over who can best exploit the Kenyan people, rendered in the tradition of oral storytelling and biblical allegory. Banned in Kenya. The most formally radical African political novel and the one most completely written as a weapon — every formal choice, including the language itself, is an act of resistance. The essential African voice on the Laugh \u0026amp; Resist shelf and the proof that satire as a political weapon belongs to no single tradition.\u003c\/div\u003e\n\u003c\/div\u003e","brand":"Punk and Pedagogy","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":45827975872710,"sku":null,"price":17.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0706\/9066\/8742\/files\/devil-on-the-cross.jpg?v=1778193605"},{"product_id":"the-phantom-tollbooth","title":"The Phantom Tollbooth","description":"\u003cdiv class=\"field\"\u003e\n\u003cdiv class=\"field-value\"\u003eMilo is a bored boy who drives his toy car through a mysterious tollbooth into the Lands Beyond, where Dictionopolis and Digitopolis are at war over whether words or numbers are more important, and the princesses Rhyme and Reason have been banished from the Kingdom of Wisdom. The demons he faces include the Terrible Trivium, who keeps people busy with meaningless tasks, and the Senses Taker, who makes people forget why they were doing anything in the first place. Juster uses wordplay, puns, and absurdist logic to make an argument about curiosity, learning, and the joy of paying attention — that boredom is not a natural condition but a choice, that the world is full of things worth noticing if you decide to notice them. Has been in print continuously since 1961 because children keep finding that it names something true about their own minds and offers a way out.\u003c\/div\u003e\n\u003c\/div\u003e","brand":"Punk and Pedagogy","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":45827977838790,"sku":null,"price":8.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0706\/9066\/8742\/files\/the-phantom-tollbooth.webp?v=1778193891"},{"product_id":"the-bad-beginning-a-series-of-unfortunate-events-book-the-first","title":"The Bad Beginning (A Series of Unfortunate Events, Book the First)","description":"\u003cdiv class=\"field\"\u003e\n\u003cdiv class=\"field-value\"\u003eThe Baudelaire orphans — Violet, Klaus, and Sunny — are placed in the care of the villainous Count Olaf after their parents die in a fire. Every adult institution designed to protect them fails: the banking system, the legal system, the educational system, well-meaning distant relatives. Count Olaf nearly gets away with everything, repeatedly, because adults keep giving him the benefit of the doubt over the children who are telling the truth. Snicket writes directly to the child reader in a voice that treats them as intelligent enough to understand that the world is not fair — and that this is important information that adults would prefer to withhold. The most sustained institutional satire ever written for children, disguised as gothic comedy. Read the first book and if your child responds, the series rewards everything they bring to it.\u003c\/div\u003e\n\u003c\/div\u003e","brand":"Punk and Pedagogy","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":45827978494150,"sku":null,"price":15.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0706\/9066\/8742\/files\/a-series-of-unfortunate-events.webp?v=1778194055"},{"product_id":"holes","title":"Holes","description":"\u003cdiv class=\"field\"\u003e\n\u003cdiv class=\"field-value\"\u003eStanley Yelnats is sent to Camp Green Lake — a juvenile detention facility in the Texas desert with no lake, no shade, and one rule: every boy digs one hole every day, five feet wide and five feet deep, ostensibly to build character. Stanley suspects the holes are being dug for another reason entirely. Sachar weaves three timelines — Stanley's present, his great-great-grandfather's curse, and the 19th century outlaw Kissin' Kate Barlow — to show how injustice accumulates across generations and eventually, improbably, resolves. The most complete satirical portrait of the American juvenile justice system ever written for children — a story that names the gap between what institutions claim to do and what they actually do with the comic precision of someone who has thought very carefully about how to make that argument to a ten-year-old. Newbery Medal winner.\u003c\/div\u003e\n\u003c\/div\u003e","brand":"Punk and Pedagogy","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":45827978887366,"sku":null,"price":8.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0706\/9066\/8742\/files\/holes.webp?v=1778194160"},{"product_id":"the-true-story-of-the-three-little-pigs","title":"The True Story of the Three Little Pigs","description":"\u003cdiv class=\"field\"\u003e\n\u003cdiv class=\"field-value\"\u003eA. Wolf just had a cold and needed to borrow a cup of sugar. The houses were structurally unsound. The whole thing has been completely misrepresented by the media. Scieszka's picture book makes the oldest possible argument about narrative — that every story has a perspective, that the official version is always told by whoever survived to tell it, and that the villain of one story is the hero of another — in the most accessible possible form: a fairy tale retold by its villain. The first step toward everything else on the P\u0026amp;P shelf. A child who understands that the wolf has his own account of what happened is a child who will eventually ask who else's account is missing from the stories they've been told.\u003c\/div\u003e\n\u003c\/div\u003e","brand":"Punk and Pedagogy","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":45827979182278,"sku":null,"price":8.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0706\/9066\/8742\/files\/the-true-story-of-the-three-little-pigs.jpg?v=1778194242"},{"product_id":"don-quixote","title":"Don Quixote","description":"\u003cdiv class=\"field\"\u003e\n\u003cdiv class=\"field-value\"\u003eA man reads so many chivalric romances that he decides to become a knight. He names himself Don Quixote de la Mancha, recruits a bewildered neighbor as his squire, and rides out to do battle with the forces of evil — which turn out to be windmills, flocks of sheep, and a barber's basin he mistakes for a golden helmet. Cervantes published this in 1605 as a direct satire of the adventure story tradition that had convinced a generation of Spanish readers that knight errantry was a model for living — and produced the first modern novel and the most complete literary argument ever made that the stories we tell ourselves about the world are more dangerous than the world itself. Every satirist from Voltaire to Vonnegut to Snicket learned something from how this works. The foundational text of the entire Laugh \u0026amp; Resist shelf — the book that first understood that following a dangerous narrative to its logical conclusion is more devastating than arguing against it directly.\u003c\/div\u003e\n\u003c\/div\u003e","brand":"Punk and Pedagogy","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":45836154929350,"sku":null,"price":29.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0706\/9066\/8742\/files\/don-quixote.jpg?v=1778603334"},{"product_id":"the-nose-and-other-stories","title":"The Nose and Other Stories","description":"\u003cdiv class=\"field\"\u003e\n\u003cdiv class=\"field-value\"\u003eA government official wakes up to find his nose has left his face and is walking around St. Petersburg with a higher civil service rank than he has. The nose refuses to acknowledge him in public. Gogol uses this absurdist premise to expose the specific absurdity of Russian bureaucratic society — a world where rank and the performance of status matter more than reality, where the social machinery is so complete that a nose can outrank its former face without anyone finding this fundamentally unusual. Was made uncomfortable by the tsarist censors, who found the satire accurate enough to be dangerous. The most important Russian satirist and the writer who showed Kafka exactly how to use the impossible premise as a diagnostic tool for the completely real. The missing link between Cervantes and Kafka on the absurdist shelf.\u003c\/div\u003e\n\u003c\/div\u003e","brand":"Punk and Pedagogy","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":45836488343750,"sku":null,"price":17.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0706\/9066\/8742\/files\/the-nose-and-other-stories.jpg?v=1778603395"},{"product_id":"the-autumn-of-the-patriarch","title":"The Autumn of the Patriarch","description":"\u003cdiv class=\"field\"\u003e\n\u003cdiv class=\"field-value\"\u003eA Caribbean dictator so ancient that nobody can remember a time before him rules over a country so completely that reality itself has bent to accommodate his power. The novel is narrated in a single sentence that runs for pages without a period — because a dictatorship doesn't pause, doesn't allow for breath, doesn't end until it ends. García Márquez uses the dictator novel form to make the definitive Latin American argument about how authoritarian power operates not just politically but epistemologically — how it rewrites history, bends reality, and makes the meaning of words themselves serve the regime. The most formally ambitious political novel in the Latin American tradition and the one that most precisely shows how power that has lasted long enough stops being a political condition and becomes the weather.\u003c\/div\u003e\n\u003c\/div\u003e","brand":"Punk and Pedagogy","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":45836489130182,"sku":null,"price":17.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0706\/9066\/8742\/files\/the-autumn-of-the-patriarch.webp?v=1778626784"},{"product_id":"if-on-a-winters-night-a-traveler","title":"If on a winter's night a traveler","description":"\u003cdiv class=\"field\"\u003e\n\u003cdiv class=\"field-value\"\u003eYou are about to begin reading Italo Calvino's new novel. The novel keeps being interrupted — misbound, replaced, lost, forged — and you keep trying to find the continuation. Calvino addresses the entire novel to you, the reader, in second person, making the act of reading the subject of the book itself. The formal argument is the political one: that reading is not a passive act of consumption but an active act of construction, that the reader makes the text as much as the writer does, that a story requires your participation to exist. The most accessible introduction to metafiction ever written and the most fun — it is also genuinely suspenseful despite being a novel about reading a novel. Directly relevant to DoCR: the same argument Brecht makes about theatre and Bazin makes about cinema, applied to the novel form. Dual-tagged because the formal argument is as important as the comedy.\u003c\/div\u003e\n\u003c\/div\u003e","brand":"Punk and Pedagogy","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":45836489392326,"sku":null,"price":18.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0706\/9066\/8742\/files\/if-on-a-winter-s-night-a-traveler.webp?v=1778626844"},{"product_id":"mother-night","title":"Mother Night","description":"\u003cdiv class=\"field\"\u003e\n\u003cdiv class=\"field-value\"\u003eHoward W. Campbell Jr. was an American playwright who became a Nazi propagandist during WWII — delivering radio broadcasts that inflamed hatred across Germany — but was simultaneously, secretly, a spy for the Americans whose coded messages inside those broadcasts saved thousands of Allied lives. After the war nobody can prove he was a spy. He is tried as a war criminal. The novel's moral is stated directly by Vonnegut in his introduction: we are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be. Darker than Slaughterhouse-Five, less comfortable than Cat's Cradle — the dark humor is present but the grief is heavier, the complicity is real, and the comedy is the thing that makes the moral bearable rather than the thing that makes it land. The most morally serious Vonnegut novel and the one that most honestly confronts the question of what it means to do terrible things for good reasons.\u003c\/div\u003e\n\u003c\/div\u003e","brand":"Punk and Pedagogy","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":45836489588934,"sku":null,"price":18.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0706\/9066\/8742\/files\/mother-night.webp?v=1778626920"},{"product_id":"civilwarland-in-bad-decline","title":"CivilWarLand in Bad Decline","description":"\u003cdiv class=\"field\"\u003e\n\u003cdiv class=\"field-value\"\u003eA theme park where Civil War reenactors keep getting shot by actual gangs. A corporate memo written in the language of empowerment while workers are destroyed by the system it describes. A haunted theme park. A futuristic advertising dystopia. Saunders's first collection of stories is set in a near-future America of corporate euphemism and spectacular moral failure — and the horror of it is that the language his characters use to describe their situation is recognizably the language of the actual present. The most precise satirist of late capitalism's language writing in America today: the gap between what corporations say and what they do is Saunders's entire subject, and he renders it with a black comedy that makes you laugh and then feel terrible about laughing, which is exactly the right response. The essential companion to Capitalist Realism — Fisher names the system, Saunders makes you feel its texture in your body.\u003c\/div\u003e\n\u003c\/div\u003e","brand":"Punk and Pedagogy","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":45836491292870,"sku":null,"price":17.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0706\/9066\/8742\/files\/civilwarland-in-bad-decline.webp?v=1778627132"},{"product_id":"america-the-book","title":"America (The Book)","description":"\u003cdiv class=\"field\"\u003e\n\u003cdiv class=\"field-value\"\u003eA fake civics textbook that is also a real civics lesson. Stewart and the Daily Show writing staff dismantle the mythology of American democracy using the exact form they're parodying — complete with fake photographs, fake Supreme Court Justice centerfolds, fake exercises, fake teacher's editions — to make the argument that the official account of how American democracy works is itself a kind of satire. The joke is that the parody is more accurate than the original. Published in 2004 when The Daily Show was at its peak as a political institution — the moment when comedy news became the most trusted source of political information for a generation, which is either a triumph of satire or an indictment of journalism, and probably both. The most accessible introduction to American political satire as a genre and the most entertaining civics lesson available.\u003c\/div\u003e\n\u003c\/div\u003e","brand":"Punk and Pedagogy","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":45836491948230,"sku":null,"price":19.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0706\/9066\/8742\/files\/america-the-book.jpg?v=1778627203"},{"product_id":"the-importance-of-being-earnest","title":"The Importance of Being Earnest","description":"\u003cdiv class=\"field\"\u003e\n\u003cdiv class=\"field-value\"\u003eWilde wrote this in 1895 and it was being performed at the St. James's Theatre while he was simultaneously being prosecuted for gross indecency. Every joke about the performance of respectability, every line about the gap between public identity and private truth, every moment where a character maintains an elaborate fiction to survive polite society, was written by a man who knew exactly what maintaining an elaborate fiction to survive polite society cost. The play looks like a farce about two men who have invented alter egos to escape their social obligations. It is actually about the violence of a society that demands you perform a self you are not and the specific survival strategy of treating that demand so completely seriously that it collapses into comedy. Wilde was sentenced to two years hard labor for being gay. He died in exile three years after his release. Camp — the sensibility Susan Sontag named and that John Waters perfected — starts here: the refusal to take the serious seriously, the insistence on style as content, the understanding that the only honest response to a society organized around performance is to perform better and more obviously than anyone else. The most formally perfect comedy in the English language and the most punk biography on the comedy shelf after Lenny Bruce.\u003c\/div\u003e\n\u003c\/div\u003e","brand":"Punk and Pedagogy","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":45867205427398,"sku":null,"price":13.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0706\/9066\/8742\/files\/the-importance-of-being-earnest.jpg?v=1779372340"},{"product_id":"the-picture-of-dorian-gray","title":"The Picture of Dorian Gray","description":"\u003cdiv class=\"field\"\u003e\n\u003cdiv class=\"field-value\"\u003eDorian Gray is young and beautiful and has his portrait painted. He wishes that the portrait would age instead of him — and it does. He spends the next twenty years living without consequence while the painting accumulates every moral cost of his choices in his place. Wilde published this in 1890 and it was immediately attacked as immoral, decadent, and corrupting — which was accurate, in the sense that it was a direct attack on Victorian morality's central fiction: that virtue shows on the face and vice marks the body. Dorian's beauty is a lie the world insists on believing because beauty is the only currency Victorian society actually values. The preface — added after the attacks — contains the most important aesthetic statement Wilde ever made: there is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book, only well-written or badly-written ones. This book sits at the hinge between Laugh \u0026amp; Resist and Feel the Fissure. It begins as Camp and ends as horror, because Wilde understood that the performance of beauty as transcendence eventually consumes everything. The companion to The Importance of Being Earnest: that play shows the comedy of the performance, this novel shows what the performance costs.\u003c\/div\u003e\n\u003c\/div\u003e","brand":"Punk and Pedagogy","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":45867210539206,"sku":null,"price":11.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0706\/9066\/8742\/files\/picture-of-dorian-gray.webp?v=1779372683"},{"product_id":"fake-accounts","title":"Fake Accounts","description":"\u003cdiv class=\"field\"\u003e\n\u003cdiv class=\"field-value\"\u003eThe narrator discovers her boyfriend is secretly running a wildly popular Instagram conspiracy account — and then he dies, leaving her with no one to confront and no way to process what she found. She moves to Berlin, starts creating fake accounts herself on dating apps, performing different versions of herself for strangers, and gradually loses track of where the performance ends and the person begins. Oyler writes with the seductive confidence of someone who knows exactly how complicit she is in the thing she's satirizing — the internet ecosystem that makes everyone a curator of a self, that turns authenticity into another performance, that makes the line between the conspiracy theorist and the person horrified by him thinner than either would like to admit. The fictional companion to Combating Cult Mind Control in the coercive control bundle: Hassan names the mechanism by which groups capture people's reality, Oyler renders the texture of what it feels like when reality has already been captured and you can't locate the exit. The comedy is the horror. The horror is the comedy. That's the internet.\u003c\/div\u003e\n\u003c\/div\u003e","brand":"Punk and Pedagogy","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":45886761828550,"sku":null,"price":16.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0706\/9066\/8742\/files\/fake-accounts.webp?v=1779908747"}],"url":"https:\/\/punkandpedagogy.com\/collections\/satire-and-absurdism-1.oembed","provider":"Punk and Pedagogy","version":"1.0","type":"link"}