The Satanic Nurses: And Other Literary Parodies

by J.B. Miller

Book Overview

For fans of The Neal Pollack Anthology of American Literature, a witty andoutrageously funny collection of literary parodies.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0312305443
• ISBN13: 9780312305444
• Release Date: January 2003
• Publisher: Thomas Dunne Books
• Length: 208 Pages
• Weight: 0.75 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 5.1" x 7.8"

Customer Reviews

Extremely modern comedy

Some people think it is fun to do a parody of a song, but this book extends comedy to make fun of literary personalities for more than half a century. I have fond memories of being in the presence of three of the authors mentioned in this book, usually for readings from a book that I had not read. Just knowing that such people exist is part of the omniscience of our journalistic age, but I have read books by more than a dozen, most of which were pretty funny. Comedy skits are becoming a fundamental part of the way in which many people develop an understanding of the world. At the cutting edge, the raw material which the world provides is more mysterious than the nature of jokes. Entertainment values can skewer select lives in ways that are most amusing when the punishment is self-inflicted, and education can become an effort to addict people to reading with this kind of expectation. My life is as prone to this addiction as any, with several movies adding to the knowledge that I have of a few more creative efforts. Comedy is a habit that has become widely admired as the nature of reality has become so skewed that a major reason everybody is not equal has to be because we know different jokes. Parody is a pretense which allows J. B. Miller to make obvious how difficult any effort to produce a meaningful reflection of our times became in a century which followed the great minds, Freud and Jung, joking about polymorphous perversity.You ought to be curious about what is in this book, if you have any appreciation for how funny people's thinking has been lately, but you can't depend on anything that it says because the disclaimer on the page before the Contents says: "Don't believe a word of it." With 44 selections in the 235 numbered pages, at an average of 5 pages per author sampled, selected, folded. spindled, or mutilated, which were preceded by a ten-page introduction dated May 2002, in which the satirist claims he was nine when he pocketed pages from Virginia Wolff's journal dated 1936, which could mean J. B. Miller was born before 1928, and might have been 74 when he produced these reflections on "these ink-stained wretches" (p. xi) who supposedly "entrusted these pieces to me on the understanding that I would never share them with anyone. So here they are." (p. xii).Was rock funny? In the "Rabbit Rocks" by John Updike, Harry Angstrom is in a man band, leaping and tripping on a speaker cable, falling off the stage for a compound fracture of his right leg. Janice tells him, "You're a joke. They're calling it Lame Rock." (p. 100). Then in the List of Works by Joyce Carol Oates, there's "I'm a Believer: Musings on the Monkees." (p. 112). That's more like a reminder than a joke, coming after "Whodathunkit (I did)" (p. 111).People don't always plan to get old, but "Harry Potter and the Rolling Stone" by J. K. Rowling describes Keith as something worse: "The heap coughed and then closed its eyes. Harry assumed it had gone back to

Smart, pithy hilarity

This is the stuff your English teacher never told you about. Miller has put together a fine collection of satires. He's not only well read, but well versed in The Marx Brothers, Mad Magazine, Beyond the Fringe, Monty Python, and Jackass.

The funniest book!!!!

I haven't laughed so much since the last time I laughed this much, which never happened before. This book is HILARIOUS! If you like literary satire, this book is for you. The Harry Potter spoof had be falling off my chair. Unfortunately I was driving at the time. When I woke up in the hospital I asked the staff where my copy of THE SATANIC NURSES was. They thought I was making fun of them, so they had me operated on by Dr. Thousxisamspams. I think he was the guy who killed Andy Warhol. Anyway, during the operation he started reading the book, which he must have found somewhere (it was probably MY copy), which made him laugh so much (I think it was the piece called She's a Right Ho, Jeeves, the send-up of P.G. Wodehouse) that he botched the operation, and now I have a dirty grin stuck on my face. Anyway, the book is pretty funny. But read it on a train or something.