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Parodies and caricatures, observed Aldous Huxley, are "the most penetrating of criticisms." These companion anthologies skewer English and American authors from Jonathan Swift (by Alexander Pope) to Raymond Chandler (by Woody Allen) with no tips on the foils.
Poets are treated even more harshly than writers of prose. Chaucer, for example, unintentionally parodies himself with the overwritten "The Cook's Tale." And the droning profundity of T.S. Eliot is sent up by Henry Reed: "As we get older, we do not get any younger/ Seasons return, and today I am fifty-five,/ And this time last year I was fifty-four,/ And this time next year I shall be sixty-two."
In Fiction John Updike lampoons Jack Kerouac: "Gogi Himmelman of the tattered old greenasgrass knickers . . . and the vastiest, most vortical, most insatiable eyes." But savagery is not a one-way street. Updike's Rabbit is roasted by Ian Duncan: "Big Chicken Henderson scoops and whittles at the space beneath his chin with a checkout-counter razor." After caricatures of versifiers like Shakespeare ("To be or not to be; that is the bare bodkin") and novelists like Jane Austen ("Are you not happy in Hertfordshire, Mr. Raskolnikov?"), Editor William Zaranka confesses, "The avowed purpose of both volumes is the same: to fool the sophomores." School's out, and the books are now free to entertain and bamboozle everyone else, in and out of the academy.