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A squalidly funny collection of short stories set in the ruined fairground of Brexit Britain, these “postcards from hell” present parochial filth as mock epic.

When I spoke to Corbyn in advance of this year’s Bloomsday – 16 June, the day in 1904 on which the events of Joyce’s Dublin mock epic are set – he recalled first reading it in the early 80s while travelling round Europe and north Africa by train.

Excerpted in samizdat in the Soviet Union, the novel was published in Paris in 1975 and followed one year later by “The Ivankiad,” an autobiographical mock epic about Mr. Voinovich’s quest for a two-room apartment in the Moscow Writers’ Housing Cooperative.

As one of his assignments, he had to write a mock epic poem.

The Trollope of the Barsetshire novels is a master of the mock epic.