Liliputins in English

"Liliputins are nothing else but a nice try to live and understand life backwards..."
—Soren Kierkegaard

"Creating liliputins means playing with words as with glass beads..."
—Hermann Hesse

"The acerbic wit of liliputins is hurtful and helpful at the same time, like a surgeon's knife..."
—Gore Vidal

"Misquotations are sometimes better than originals..."
—Mark Twain

"A liliputin is a jigsaw puzzle that makes sense only when the last missing piece falls into place..."
—Orson Welles

"Liliputins are nothing else but linguistic and historical puzzles..."
—Yury Lobo


Liliputins

"Yury pushes the boundaries of satire; he is provocative and spares no one, himself included."
—Trevor Noah


Liliputins (derived from the adjective "lilliputian," which means "very small in size," but in my case not necessarily "trivial," and the idiom "to put words in somebody's mouth") are a brand-new, cutting-edge direction in modern postmodern fiction of mockery, ridicule, sarcasm, and derision, solely created, coined, and penned by me.

Based on Soren Kierkegaard's idea that life can only be understood backward, I'm deliberately, willfully, and literally putting made-up words or real (or twisted) quotations into the mouths of great historical figures and fictional protagonists of all eras and countries, dead or alive. These are words they never said, but might have.

To make a long story short, liliputins are my own mostly revisionistic and anachronistic creations. They take the form of intentionally produced misquotations or counterfeit one-line aphorisms, maxims, mini-tales, jokes, or quips with some degree of truth in them, which I misattribute to others in order to make a point. It is completely up to the reader's level of knowledge, intelligence, and beliefs to sort truth from fiction.

Liliputins compress time and allow for the collision of the present and the past, the living and the dead, objects and people, the dead serious and the ridiculous, the real and the made up. They are also a suitable vehicle for would-be time travelers and alternative history lovers.

Liliputins are contemporary, old-fashioned, satirical, ironic, thought-provoking, mind-boggling, hilarious, sad, mean, kind, shocking, outrageous, flattering, and highly controversial, but never boring. They are always eye-opening and as short as life itself.

Mrs. Erma Bombeck once said, "There is a thin line that separates laughter and pain, comedy and tragedy, humor and hurt." I sincerely hope I did not overstep this thin line in my book. I am sorry for any unintended contempt and pain I might cause.

Oscar Wilde once said, "If you want to tell people the truth, make them laugh, otherwise they'll kill you."

So please don't kill the mockingbird!

Yury Slobodenyuk, aka Yury Lobo or Rudi Culer
The Unorthodox Thinker


This book of liliputins by Yury Lobo is available on Amazon:

Das gefluegelte Holzpferd. Mit Liliputins auf flinken Hufen durch die Weltgeschichte (German) ( 2019)