Click on a thumbnail to go to Google Books.
Loading... The Five Minute Iliad Other Instant Classics: Great Books For The Short Attention Span (2000)by Greg Nagan
Books Read in 2016 (3,746) Loading...
Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. No current Talk conversations about this book. Silly. Be sure you read every story covered, before you read Nagan's corresponding parody. His treatment of the Illiad and the Inferno was hilarious. ( ) no reviews | add a review
Was Homer really blind, or was that just his shtick? Was Dante a righty or a lefty? Why aren't there any pictures of Jane Austen in a bikini? What made Oscar so Wilde? How much did Hemingway? These are just some of the many great questions of Western literature ignored in this book. From the author of A Prairie Home Companion's beloved "Five-Minute Classics" comes The Five-Minute Iliad and Other Instant Classics, a witty and profane lampoon of the Western literary canon -- the Spinal Tap of literature. "I will never write such wordy trash again," Leo Tolstoy said of War and Peace after reading Homer in the original Greek. Tolstoy's pledge inspired humorist Greg Nagan to whet his double-edged verbal sword and offer this gleefully twisted take on what contemporary readings of the Great Books say about our society today. From The Iliad to On the Road, these fifteen parodies provide a riotous romp through Western civilization (one version of it, anyway) from Homer to Kerouac, from Ancient Greece to Postwar America, from the Lyrical Epic to the Breathless Gush. Nagan's mirthful mayhem will delight those who've read the Great Books, and those who haven't read them will find these literary caricatures entertaining in their own right. No library descriptions found. |
Current DiscussionsNone
Google Books — Loading... GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)818.5407Literature English (North America) Authors, American and American miscellany 20th Century 1945-1999LC ClassificationRatingAverage:
Is this you?Become a LibraryThing Author. |