Constant Reader: The New Yorker Columns 1927–28 (McNally Editions) - Softcover

Parker, Dorothy

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1961341255 ISBN 13: 9781961341258

Publisher: McNally Editions, 2024

Synopsis

Dorothy Parker’s complete weekly New Yorker column about books and people and the rigors of reviewing.

When, in 1927, Dorothy Parker became a book critic for the New Yorker, she was already a legendary wit, a much-quoted member of the Algonquin Round Table, and an arbiter of literary taste. In the year that she spent as a weekly reviewer, under the rupic “Constant Reader,” she created what is still the most entertaining book column ever written. Parker’s hot takes have lost none of their heat, whether she’s taking aim at the evangelist Aimee Semple MacPherson (“She can go on like that for hours. Can, hell—does”), praising Hemingway’s latest collection (“He discards detail with magnificent lavishness”), or dissenting from the Tao of Pooh (“And it is that word ‘hummy,’ my darlings, that marks the first place in The House at Pooh Corner at which Tonstant Weader Fwowed up”).

Introduced with characteristic wit and sympathy by Sloane Crosley, Constant Reader gathers the complete weekly New Yorker reviews that Parker published from October 1927 through November 1928, with gimlet-eyed appreciations of the high and low, from Isadora Duncan to Al Smith, Charles Lindbergh to Little Orphan Annie, Mussolini to Emily Post

About this title

About the Authors

Dorothy Parker née Rothschild (1898–1967), grew up on New York’s Upper West Side. She became famous for her comic poems, her short stories, her reviews, and her repartée, as recorded by the columnist Wolcott Gibbs over lunches at the Algonquin hotel. A prolific magazine contributor in her youth and a successful screenwriter (she co-wrote the original A Star is Born), she struggled all her life with alcoholism and wrote very little in her later decades, though continued to be a vocal champion of progressive causes, especially civil rights.

Sloane Crosley is the author of the essay collections I Was Told There’d Be Cake (a 2009 finalist for the Thurber Prize for American Humor), How Did You Get This Number, and Look Alive Out There (a 2019 Thurber Prize finalist); the novels The Clasp and Cult Classic; and, most recently, her memoir, Grief Is for People. A contributing editor at Vanity Fair, she lives in New York City.

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Table of Contents
Foreword by Sloane Crosley

October 1, 1927

The Highly Recurrent Mr. Hamilton—Al Smith, and How He Grew—Bad News of May Sinclair

October 8, 1927

Mrs. Colby's Second Novel --The Private Papers of the Dead--The Philosopher Takes a Long Look at Himself

October 15, 1927

An American Du Barry—A Biography of Henry Ward Beecher

October 22, 1927

Re-enter Margot Asquith—Something Young—A Masterpiece from the French

October 29, 1927

A Book of Great Short Stories—Something About Cabell

November 5, 1927

The Professor Goes in For Sweetness and Light Short Stories from One Who Knows How to Do Them—Sketches, Mostly Unpleasant—A Biography of a Much-Talked-About Lady

November 12, 1927

Mr. Morley Capers on a Toadstool—Mr. Milne Grows to be Six

November 19, 1927

Adam and Eve and Lilith and Epigrams—Something More About Cabell

November 26. 1927

Madame Glyn Lectures on “It,” with Illustrations

December 3, 1927

The Most Popular Reading Matter

December 10, 1927

The Socialist Looks at Literature—A Lyricist Looks at His Neighbors

December 17, 1927

The Short Story, Through a Couple of the Ages

December 31, 1927

Mrs. Post Enlarges on Etiquette

January 7, 1928

More Troubles for Colonel Charles A. Lindbergh

January 14, 1928

Poor, Immortal Isadora

January 28, 1928

Re-enter Miss Hurst, Followed by Mr. Tarkington

February 4, 1927

A Good Novel, and a Great Story

February 11, 1928

Literary Rotarians

February 18, 1928

Excuse It, Please

February 25, 1928

Our Lady of the Loudspeaker

March 10, 1928

Unfinished Endeavors

March 17, 1928

The Compleat Bungler

March 24, 1928

Ethereal Mildness

March 31, 1928

A Very Dull Article, Indeed

April 7, 1928

Mr. Lewis Lays It on with a Trowel

April 14, 1928

Mrs. Norris and the Beast

April 21, 1928

These Much Too Charming People

May 19, 1928

Hard-Boiled Virgins Are Faithful Lovers

May 26, 1928

Mr. See Sees It Through

August 25, 1928

Back to the Book-Shelf

September 15, 1928

Duces Wild

September 29, 1928

How it Feels to be One Hundred and Forty-six

October 20, 1928

Far from Well

November 17, 1928

Wallflower’s Lament

Edition details

• Publisher: McNally Editions
• Publication date: 2024
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1961341255
• ISBN 13: 9781961341258
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 224