The History and Adventures of an Atom

by Mary Sewell

Swift's savage political allegory wrapped in fantastical travel narratives shares Smollett's gift for weaponizing absurdity against his contemporaries. Both authors use impossible scenarios—an atom inhabiting statesmen, a man visiting tiny kingdoms—as vehicles for anatomizing the stupidity and venality of their own governments, and both do it with a scatological relish that makes their satire genuinely visceral rather than merely clever.

by Edward E. Ericson

Here's your surprise pick: Bulgakov's Soviet-era novel operates on the same principle as Smollett's Atom—layering contemporary political critique beneath a fantastical narrative that seems to be about something entirely different (in this case, the Devil visiting Moscow). The intricacy of the historical annotation you appreciated in the Smollett edition becomes essential here too; Bulgakov is encoding his critique so densely that readers need the same kind of scholarly apparatus to catch all the targets.

by Anne Dromart

Sterne's digressive masterpiece shares Smollett's anarchic energy and his willingness to let formal structure collapse in service of satire and humor. Where Smollett uses an atom's perspective to defamiliarize politics, Sterne uses typographical tricks and narrative chaos to defamiliarize storytelling itself—both are 18th-century writers who treat the novel form as something to be gleefully dismantled rather than respected.

by Herman Melville

Melville's American riverboat novel captures that same Smollett quality of using a picaresque structure to expose systematic hypocrisy and corruption—here, every passenger is either a con artist or a mark, and the book refuses to let you settle into comfortable judgments about who's who. Like the Atom, it's a work that rewards close reading and historical knowledge, and it has that same darkly comic tone about human nature and institutions.