A Book of Burlesques

by Henry Louis Mencken

Rauch shares Mencken's gift for using sharp wit and contrarian argument to puncture sacred cows—but he applies it to contemporary debates about free speech and social tolerance. Where Mencken burlesqued the pretensions of his era, Rauch defends the messy necessity of disagreement itself, making this feel like a natural intellectual companion piece rather than mere imitation.

by Herman Melville

Published in 1857, this novel predates Mencken but shares his fascination with exposing human folly through elaborate deception and dark comedy. Melville's con artists moving through a steamboat mirror Mencken's burlesques of American types—both authors find comedy in watching people reveal their own gullibility and vanity.

by Kingsley Amis

Amis channels Mencken's irreverent energy into a campus novel where the protagonist's barely-suppressed contempt for academic pomposity drives every scene. The humor operates the same way—not through slapstick but through the collision between what people pretend to be and what they actually are, delivered in prose that delights in catching them out.

by Roberto Bolaño

This might seem like a leap, but Bolaño shares Mencken's obsession with unmasking pretense—here, the pretense of literary movements and bohemian posturing. Where Mencken used short burlesques, Bolaño uses a sprawling, fragmented narrative to show how people construct false identities around art and ideology, then watch those constructions collapse.

by John Lanchester

Lanchester's narrator is a masterclass in unreliable charm—he seduces the reader with wit and erudition while gradually revealing himself as morally bankrupt, which is exactly what Mencken does to his targets in burlesques. Both authors trust readers to catch the con and enjoy the exposure of vanity masquerading as sophistication.