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Title: Complete Stories by Dorothy Parker, Colleen Breese, Regina Barreca ISBN: 0-14-243721-2 Publisher: Penguin USA (Paper) Pub. Date: January, 2003 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $15.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.83 (6 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: Men never make passes at girls reading Dorothy Parker
Comment: Dorothy Parker is one of the great women writers of the twentieth century. Though her life was marred by alcoholism and rather poor choices, her biting, insightful stories are a window into the twenties and women in general. I read her stories whenever I've had a rough day and need a giggle.
Rating: 4
Summary: Smarter than you, not that you'd know it
Comment: Mrs. Parker possessed a venom that incapacitated its victims with sheer brainy pleasure. Her stories are tight, sparse, and crunchy with wit--Oscar Wilde looks like Krusty the Klown in comparison. While some would complain that she rarely strays from critiquing the hypocrisies of the wealthy and powerful, it's hard to argue that there isn't enough material therein to fuel a thousand careers. Her work is essential reading for those of us who aren't perfectly at ease with the ways of the world but find ourselves coping with it anyway.
The Elaine Stritch readings of seven of these stories are also tremendously entertaining and worthy of separate purchase. The delight of sitting in a darkened room, listening to a master actress reading Mrs. Parker, sipping from a tumbler of whiskey, must be experienced to be believed.
Rating: 5
Summary: A Lime-Green Look at the Battles of the Sexes
Comment: And I thought I knew all of the short story writers who write good social satire, especially about the Battle of the Sexes. Do you like John Updike's dissonant couples the Maples? John Cheever's middle-class suburban sashayings? John O'Hara's accounts of evil-propelled mis-treatments and non-treatments? Ring Lardner's tales of hamfisted bunglings? Katherine Mansfield's dry-point etchings of looming males and tendril-like females?
To these I can now add Dorothy Parker--whom I discovered only last month after enjoying the above social-critics for decades. A sharp-tongued journalist, Parker wrote in New York City in the 1920's through the 1950's. She's a key addition to the "fruit salad" of these writers--call her a lime, perhaps--small, tart, acid but somehow quenching our thirst for the truth however tangy?
Parker precisely pinpoints interpersonal shipwrecks. Marriage is--what happens. Often it's like this:
In "New York to Detroit," on the telephone, a man mechanically shoves a desperate woman out of his life. The bad connection aids his "misunderstandings" of her frantic pleas.
In "Here We Are," a just-married couple travel by train to their New York City honeymoon hotel. But we see already the stress-fractures of immature overreactions, and how out of them starts to ooze the lava of hatred which will surely melt down (or burn out) the marriage soon.
In "Too Bad," women are perplexed, even astonished, that the Weldons separated. Such an ideal couple! Except Parker eavesdrops us into the couple's typical evening at home. Its genteel vacancy, polite non-communication, and quiet distancing tell the tale.
Is Parker too crude a caricaturist? Heavy on the satire, too bitter personally? True, her women seem simplified: helplessly-hysterical, nice-nice faceless patseys or creampuffs, captives of bland routines--and of men. Her men similarly seem generic males-of-the-species, "blunt bluff hearty and...meaningless," conventionally-whiskered and all, chauvinistically-insensitive if not cruel. Okay... But if it's overdone, why do I feel I have known and seen these people, or traces of them, often, and not in New York of the 1920's-1950's either?
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Title: The Poetry and Short Stories of Dorothy Parker by Dorothy Parker ISBN: 0679601325 Publisher: Modern Library Pub. Date: 30 August, 1994 List Price(USD): $17.95 |
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Title: Portable Dorothy Parker by Dorothy Parker, Brendan Gill ISBN: 0140150749 Publisher: Viking Press Pub. Date: May, 1991 List Price(USD): $14.95 |
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Title: Dorothy Parker, What Fresh Hell Is This? by Marion Meade ISBN: 0140116168 Publisher: Penguin USA (Paper) Pub. Date: March, 1989 List Price(USD): $17.95 |
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Title:Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle ASIN: 6303422136 Publisher: New Line Studios Pub. Date: 26 March, 1996 List Price(USD): $19.98 Comparison N/A, buy it from Amazon for $19.98 |
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Title: Not Much Fun: The Lost Poems of Dorothy Parker by Stuart Y. Silverstein ISBN: 0743211480 Publisher: Scribner Pub. Date: July, 2001 List Price(USD): $16.00 |
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