A gift? Yes-a gift for you. You're welcome.— from the introduction by Daniel Handler Nonsense Novels sends up the silliest conventions of the ghost story, the detective story, the rags-to-riches story, the adventure story, the shipwreck story, and, of course, the story itself. Among other things. Here the close cultivation of cliché yields a bumper crop of absurdity and the utterly ludicrous turns up at every new twist of the tale. This is a satirical masterpiece. Stephen Leacock was a genius.