Comedy web novels with public chapters on NovelCult.
A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court is one of Mark Twain’s most enduring novels. During a stay at a modern-day English castle, the narrator meets a mysterious stranger. The stranger, Hank Morgan, is an engineer from Connecticut, and proceeds to weave a satirical, biting, and hilarious tale of how he traveled back in time to find himself in the court of the legendary King Arthur.
Mark Twain · Comedy · 47 ch
In the late 19th century, Lewis Carroll —better known these days as the author of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland —was also an established mathematician who had published many books and papers in the fields of algebra and logic. His mathematical interest extended to the setting of puzzles for popular consumption. The stories collected here cover varied subjects including the cataloguing of paintings, the number of times trains will pass each other on a circular track, the most efficient way to rent individual rooms on a square, and many more.
Lewis Carroll · Comedy · 14 ch
Candide is the picaresque tale of the titular character’s fantastical journey from an insular, idealized life in a picturesque castle through the difficulties and evils of the real world. Satirical, comical, witty, and cutting, Candide was widely banned in its day for containing blasphemous and seditious concepts. Despite that, it survived controversy to become an important book in the Western literary heritage.
Voltaire · Comedy · 31 ch
Dead Souls is Nikolai Gogol’s last novel, and follows the tale of Pavel Chichikov, a down-on-his-luck gentleman determined to improve his lot in life. The story charts his scheme to purchase dead souls—the titles of deceased serfs—from wealthy landowners. The novel’s satirical take on the state of Russian society at the time leads Chichikov into increasingly difficult circumstances, in his attempts to cheat both the system and the cavalcade of townspeople he meets along the way.
Nikolai Gogol · Comedy · 20 ch
At age thirty, Madeleine Lee, a wealthy, wellborn widow, has tired of Gilded Age New York and its shallow society. She decides to spend the winter in Washington with her sister, renting a house on Lafayette Square, within easy reach of all the intense partying, horse-trading, and other activities that politics requires. As she makes friends (and enemies) with the locals, one question remains uppermost in Madeleine Lee’s mind: “Who, then, is right?
Henry Adams · Comedy · 14 ch
An aging gentleman, drunk on romances of chivalry, renames himself Don Quixote and rides out with his neighbor Sancho Panza to right wrongs across Spain. Their misadventures pit heroic fantasy against everyday life in what is often called the first modern novel.
Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra · Comedy · 139 ch
In a desire for better sheep-farming land on an unnamed British colony, Higgs decides to traverse the distant mountain range. On the other side he discovers not the empty rolling plains of his imagination but an entirely new civilization: the land of Erewhon. Inducted into the ways of their culture, he attempts to transcribe as best he can their thoughts on birth, death, machines, the production of food, their financial system, and many more subjects that on first glance seem absurd to the narrator but often end up revealing absurdity in his own thinking.
Samuel Butler · Comedy · 32 ch
Higgs has made his fortune with sales of his original travelogue Erewhon. When his wife dies, his long-held desire to return to the country overwhelms him, and even his friends agree that a change of scenery would be a good idea. Soon after his departure he returns back home to England unexpectedly early and deeply unwell, and so it’s down to his son John to piece together what happened during his fleeting visit to Erewhon.
Samuel Butler · Comedy · 29 ch
Evelina is an epistolary novel that follows the titular Evelina Anville as she navigates the challenging (and sometimes absurd) nuances of 18th-century English society. The novel begins as Evelina is invited to London by the Mirvan family, marking her first true exposure to English high society. She soon encounters a series of misunderstandings, social embarrassments, and would-be suitors.
Fanny Burney · Comedy · 88 ch
Published in The Saturday Evening Post between 1916 and 1917, the stories that make up Gullible’s Travels follow the comical misadventures of a long-suffering husband and his aspiring socialite wife. The unnamed protagonists and their hapless attempts to climb the social ladder serve as a canvas for Ring Lardner to satirize marriage, social dynamics, and the newly emerging middle class of the late 1910s. In 1917, the first five stories about the unnamed narrator and his “Missus” were compiled in book form as Gullible’s Travels, Etc.
Ring Lardner · Comedy · 7 ch
Gulliver’s Travels was published in 1726 and is probably the most famous work by Jonathan Swift. It was an instant hit—selling out within a week—and has never been out of print, as well as having been adapted many times. Lemuel Gulliver, an English surgeon on the Antelope, is shipwrecked and washed up on the island of Lilliput, where the inhabitants are less than six inches tall.
Jonathan Swift · Comedy · 41 ch
Kipps is the story of Arthur “Artie” Kipps, an illegitimate orphan raised by his aunt and uncle on the southern coast of England in the town of New Romney. Kipps falls in love with neighbor friend Ann Pornick but soon loses touch with her as he begins an apprenticeship at a drapery establishment in the port town of Folkestone. After a drunken evening with his new friend Chitterlow, an aspiring playwright, Kipps discovers he is to inherit a house and sizable income from his grandfather.
H. G. Wells · Comedy · 20 ch
In Looking Backward, well-to-do Julian West of Boston falls asleep for 113 years and awakes to find the world of 2000 fundamentally changed. An old man and his daughter care for him and take him on a tour of the new world. In the new society, a single nationalized corporation-state under a single political party guarantees work, comfort, and luxury to everyone in the “industrial army.” Looking Backward is a watershed utopian novel following in the path laid by books like Thomas More’s Utopia, Margaret Cavendish’s The Blazing World, and Louis-Sébastien Mercier’s The Year 2440.
Edward Bellamy · Sci Fi · 29 ch
A man of unusually large stature and dexterity arrives at a boardinghouse on the wind—literally—while its unsuspecting lodgers look on in shock. The man, Innocent Smith, performs comic, eccentric, and dastardly acts which are examined and put to trial by the residents and renowned experts. Lawyers on both sides of the question of Innocent Smith’s guilt bring revelatory correspondence to the trial.
G. K. Chesterton · Comedy · 10 ch
A cold-blooded adventurer schemes, swindles, and seduces his way across Europe without a shred of remorse. A dark early novel about a villain told entirely from the villain's side of the table.
Tobias Smollett · Drama · 68 ch
One of the great American novels, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn tells the story of Huck Finn and his travels with Jim, an escaped slave. Roundly criticised by contemporary reviewers for its colorful and literal language and even banned by several libraries, it sealed its historical importance in part by being one of the first novels to be written entirely in American vernacular. While Huck Finn is, on its face, an adventure tale for younger readers, it’s also a cutting satire and a nuanced examination of racism and morality.
Mark Twain · Adventure · 46 ch
A young Scotsman with no fortune ships out as a surgeon's mate and endures press-gangs, quacks, and rogues across sea and land. A rough, funny adventure about making one's way in an unforgiving world.
Tobias Smollett · Adventure · 71 ch
The irrepressible Tom Sawyer drives his Aunt Polly to distraction; she can’t decide whether to cry or laugh at his antics. He fights, falls in love, and finds adventure with two of his friends, one of whom will later become famous in his own right. Along the way he attends his own funeral, wins the girl by falsely confessing to something she did, and, most famously, convinces most of the boys in town to pay him for the privilege of painting his aunt’s fence.
Mark Twain · Adventure · 37 ch
After being turned out by his parents for his disobedience, a Maronite teenager named Khalid scrapes up the funds to emigrate to the United States of America by working as a muleteer. Crossing the Atlantic with his friend Shakib, Khalid sets himself up in New York city as a peddler of counterfeit trinkets “made in the Holy Land.” He quickly loses interest in peddling and develops eccentric philosophical views as he immerses himself in various turn-of-the-century subcultures, including the freethought movement, Bohemianism, and Tammany Hall. Spurred on by his love for his cousin Najma, Khalid returns to his Lebanese hometown, Baalbek, where his iconoclastic philosophy earns him the enmity of the religious and secular authorities.
Ameen Rihani · Comedy · 33 ch
In the time of a devastating pandemic, seven women and three men withdraw to a country estate outside Florence to give themselves a diversion from the death around them. Once there, they decide to spend some time each day telling stories, each of the ten to tell one story each day. They do this for ten days, with a few other days of rest in between, resulting in the 100 stories of the Decameron.
Giovanni Boccaccio · Comedy · 113 ch