The great prose satire of the English language, a book so viciously intelligent it was once burned publicly in Shanghai. Swift imagined a ship's surgeon tumbling through strange lands, each voyage a funhouse mirror held up to European society. In Lilliput, he towers over a nation of pygmies whose petty court intrigues mirror the absurdity of real empires. In Brobdingnag, he is the curiosity, a tiny man inspected by giants who find humanity contemptible. The flying island of Laputa skewers the scientists and projectors of the Royal Society, dreamers so lost in abstraction they neglect their starving countryside. And in the final voyage, Swift delivers his darkest vision: the Houyhnhnms, rational horses, and the Yahoos, brutal ape-like creatures who uncannily resemble humanity. The comedy never relents, but beneath it lies a misanthropy so total it became prophetic. A savage, funny, unsettling masterpiece that disguises itself as a boy's adventure story.
