Book cover of Gargantua and Pantagruel

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Why read it?

1 author picked Gargantua and Pantagruel as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

Giants defecating, fornicating, getting drunk, and having a gay old time – does literature get any better than this? The answer is no, of course.

The fact that it was written by a French monk in the sixteenth century boggles the mind even further – he certainly got into his fair share of trouble for this masterpiece of the bawdy and grotesque. The novel’s anti-authoritarian ethos, its celebration of the carnivalesque, was later discoursed upon by Mikhail Bakhtin in Rabelais and His World, one of the greatest works of literary criticism ever written. 

From Travis' list on when you need a heavy dose of satire.

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