The Portable Dorothy Parker
Before there was Fran Leibowitz, there was Dorothy Parker. Before there was practically anyone, there was Dorothy Parker. When it comes to expressing the pleasure and pain of being just a touch too smart to be happy, she's winner and still champion after all these years. Along with Robert...
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Before there was Fran Leibowitz, there was Dorothy Parker. Before there was practically anyone, there was Dorothy Parker. When it comes to expressing the pleasure and pain of being just a touch too smart to be happy, she's winner and still champion after all these years. Along with Robert Benchley, Alexander Woollcott, and the rest of the Algonquin Round Table, she dominated American pop lit in the '20s and '30s; like Ginger Rogers, she did it all backwards. Parker's held up well--maybe the best of all of them. This book is essential for any Parker fan, and an excellent way for new readers to make her acquaintance. It reprints her finest short stories and poems, some later articles, and all of her excellent "Constant Reader" book reviews from the Depression-era glory days of the New Yorker. The poetry, always light, has become brittle, sorry to say. But you've only to pick any story to be reminded that no middle-distance writer was better than Parker at her best.
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Format: paperback
ISBN:
9780140150742 (0140150749)
Publish date: December 9th 1976
Publisher: Penguin
Pages no: 603
Edition language: English
Category:
Classics,
Humor,
Writing,
Essays,
Literature,
American,
Anthologies,
Adult,
Poetry,
Short Stories,
Womens
The Audio version of "The Telephone Call" just had me in tears. It was the last story and after hours of snappish and witty fun, BAM, there is this story that I can so relate to told in a voice that sounds so much like mine, lost, in pain, desperate. My God, the best short ever written...at least fo...
Dorothy Parker is more interesting as a person than as a writer. The book contains short stories, poems and nonfiction pieces. My favorite part are the book reviews. Parker is an impeccable judge of literary value, although I do not always agree with her interpretations. Her writing about litera...
Once upon a time I had this idea that one should read a book from start to finish, and if one was being particularly through that included the preface and any appendix. However that technique has often left me hanging in one part of a book (really wishing that I was reading another part, farther in)...
I only read from page 445 to the end. Her short stories take up the first several hundred pages. They are dry and boring and contain not a hint of her trademark wit, so I skipped them. The miscellaneous non-fiction pieces at the back of the book are the jewels in her scribbler's crown. Book reviews,...
It's not that I don't like earnestness, it's just that I love a dark humor and a witty repartee better. Dorothy Parker scratches that itch perfectly.
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