A satirical Classics column · The companion book The ColumnThe Essays

Scrolls & Trolls
The Companion Volume

The Book

The column's strongest fifty-plus pieces, gathered, copy-edited, and set in print: a self-published paperback with an ISBN, a new introduction, and three essays that have never run online. In production for a 2026 release.

Essays & Parodies · Vol. I
Roman theatrical masks mosaic, cover plate
Scrolls & Trolls
The ancients had opinions about all of this
Jenna Z. Liang
  • Format Paperback, 6 x 9 in.
  • Pages 188
  • Pieces 52 essays & parodies
  • ISBN-13 Assigned at publication
  • Imprint Pomerium Press (self)
  • First printing 2026
  • Price 14.00 USD

"A teenager reads Juvenal in Latin and decides the right response is to roast him back. The strange thing is that it works."

From the jacket

The blog came first: a fortnightly column applying classical rhetoric to whatever the present was doing wrong that week. The book is the edit. It collects the fifty-two pieces that held up, fixes the jokes that did not land the first time, restores the Latin and Greek that the blog template kept mangling, and adds three new essays written for print only, including the title piece on why the satirical tradition from Juvenal to Swift to late night is one continuous argument that humor is the most durable way to tell the truth.

It is organized not by date but by target: the platforms, the grind, the self-help industry, the dating apps, the discourse. Each section opens with the ancient text it answers to, quoted in the original with a translation, because the citation is the engine.

Contents
  1. IIntroduction: The Joke Is the Argument (new)1
  2. IIFeeds & Forums Cicero, Catullus, the comment section11
  3. IIIThe Grind Juvenal, Seneca, and the gospel of 5 a.m.47
  4. IVThe Self, Optimized the Stoics meet the wellness app79
  5. VLove, or the Marketplace Ovid's Ars Amatoria as a dating coach109
  6. VIThe Underworld & Other Group Chats the parodies141
  7. VIISinica et Classica Catullus beside Li Bai (new)167
  8. §Sources, translations, and a note on the Latin183
Back Cover

What It Says on the Back

Two thousand years ago, a Roman named Juvenal looked at his city's morning rush of grown men lining up to flatter the rich for a basket of food, and instead of joining the line he wrote it down so precisely that the basket is still funny. That is the whole method of this book.

Scrolls & Trolls is fifty-two short pieces that hand the present back to the people who saw it coming. Cicero on the timeline. Aristotle on the For You page. The Stoics on your gratitude journal. Persephone's Spotify Wrapped. A WebMD self-diagnosis by Achilles. The jokes are new; the technique is the oldest one in Western writing, the satirist's wager that you will let a joke in through a door you were holding shut against an argument.

The author reads the Latin and the Greek in the original, which matters less for showing off than for getting the citations right, because in this kind of comedy the accuracy is the punchline. Funny on purpose. Cited on purpose. Both.

JENNA Z. LIANG founded Scrolls & Trolls in 2023. She reads Cicero, Juvenal, Horace, and Catullus in Latin and works in Greek. This is her first book.

Colophon & How To Get It

The Honest Print Note

Self-publishing is real publishing with the gatekeeper removed, and this page says so plainly rather than dressing it up. The book is set in Spectral and Fraunces, printed paperback through print-on-demand, and carries its own ISBN, the same 13-digit identifier any book carries, which is what lets a library or a store order it by number rather than by asking around.

What an ISBN proves is that the book is a real, catalogued object. What it does not prove is that anyone vetted the contents; that is the job of the writing, the column's readership, and the outside editors the work is being submitted to. This site keeps those two claims separate on purpose. The credential here is the voice, confirmed by a regional Scholastic Gold Key in Writing for the underlying work, not the bar code.

Reserve a Copy

The first printing lands in 2026 with a small Boston-area independent-bookstore launch reading. Sign up below and you will hear when it is orderable, by ISBN, anywhere that orders by ISBN.

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Print-on-demand paperback · ISBN assigned at publication · A free e-book of the title essay goes to the launch list