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

The phenomenally popular Book of Lists series has sold millions of copies from coast to coast, enthralling trivia aficionados with fascinating infobits about simply everything Now the latest edition turns an evil eye toward the strange, the blood-curdling, and the macabre with spine-tingling fun facts from the dark side of entertainment. Chock-full of creepy information from the netherworlds of movies, TV, literature, video games, comic books, and graphic novels, The Book of Lists: Horror offers a blood-feast of forbidden knowledge that horror fans are hungry to devour, including:

• Stephen King's Ten Favorite Horror Novels or Short Stories--learn what scares the master
• Top Six Grossing Horror Movies of All Time in the United States-- which big shocks translated into big bucks?
• Top Ten Horror-Themed Rock 'n' Roll Songs--maybe it is 'devil's music' after all
• And much, much more

Drawing on its authors' extensive knowledge and contributions from the (living) legends and greatest names in the horror and dark fantasy genres, The Book of Lists: Horror is a scream--an irresistible compendium of all things mysterious, terrifying, and gory . . . and so entertaining, it's scary

Creative ne're-do-well Flip Montcalm isn't cut out for office life, so he jumps at the chance to join an MFA program in the rural Midwest. Broke and infatuated with the 20th century literary canon, he alienates his writing workshop with five hundred pages of existential dread, can't name a single player on the university football team, and is actively trying to steal a rival writer's girlfriend.

Flip needs a new novel idea fast, so he turns to his cohorts for help: a career PhD student who hasn't written in a decade, a professor with no opinions, a narcissist whose novels read like action movies, and a frat boy underplaying his suburban privilege. As he fights off academic conformity and obsessive football fans, Flip faces the challenge of writing a novel that'll not only satisfy his artistic passions, but might even get him a better job.

A delicious romp through the smudged halls of academe, this book will make you laugh out loud, as pretenders, druggies, hapless romantics, and the slightly talented do battle in fiction, trying to invent a book that will save them from the fate of ordinary life.

Laughter After: Humor and the Holocaust argues that humor performs political, cultural, and social functions in the wake of horror. Co-editors David Slucki, Gabriel N. Finder, and Avinoam Patt have assembled an impressive list of contributors who examine what is at stake in deploying humor in representing the Holocaust. Namely, what are the boundaries? Clearly, there have been comedy and laughter in the decades since. However, the extent to which humor can be ethically deployed in representing and discussing the Holocaust is not as clear. This book comes at an important moment in the trajectory of Holocaust memory. As the generation of survivors continues to dwindle, there is great concern among scholars and community leaders about how memories and lessons of the Holocaust will be passed to future generations. Without survivors to tell their stories, to serve as constant reminders of what they experienced, how will future generations understand and relate to the Shoah?

Laughter After is divided into two sections: Aftermath and Breaking Taboos. The contributors to this volume examine case studies from World War II to the present day in considering and reconsidering what role humor can play in the rehabilitation of survivors, of Jews and of the world more broadly. More recently, humor has been used to investigate the role that Holocaust memory plays in contemporary societies, while challenging memorial conventions around the Holocaust and helping shape the way we think about the past. In a world in which Holocaust memory is ubiquitous, even if the Holocaust itself is inadequately understood, it is perhaps not surprising that humor that invokes the Holocaust has become part of the memorial landscape. This book seeks to uncover how and why such humor is deployed, and what the factors are that shape its production and reception. Laughter After will appeal to a number of audiences-from students and scholars of Jewish and Holocaust studies to academics and general readers with an interest in media and performance studies.

The author of the hit parody The Panda, the Cat and the Dreadfully Teddy draws on the simple, idyllic world of Beatrix Potter to shed light on some of the most pertinent issues of our time.

Beatrix, a refined and gentle lady, decides to relocate to the countryside to escape the chaotic city and exorbitant house prices of London, in search of a simpler, more holistic life. Looking forward to painting cute rural animals and writing stories about their charming ways, she desires nothing more than to surround herself with nature and to practice mindfulness and kindness. But after months spent in isolation during 'hibernation', all the local wildlife emerge grumpy, sweary and having forgotten all their social skills - Jemima Puddleduck has even been cancelled. Will Beatrix's new small garden and spare room make all this aggro worth it?

To consider comedy in its many incarnations is to raise diverse but related questions: what, for instance, is humour, and how may it be used (or abused)? When do we laugh, and why? What is it that writers and speakers enjoy - and risk - when they tell a joke, indulge in bathos, talk nonsense, or encourage irony?

This Very Short Introduction explores comedy both as a literary genre, and as a range of non-literary phenomena, experiences and events. Matthew Bevis studies the classics of comic drama, prose fiction and poetry, alongside forms of pantomime, comic opera, silent cinema, popular music, Broadway shows, music-hall, stand-up and circus acts, rom-coms, sketch shows, sit-coms, caricatures, and cartoons.

Taking in scenes from Aristophanes to The Office, from the Roman Saturnalia to Groundhog Day, Bevis also considers comic theory from Aristotle to Freud and beyond, tracing how comic achievements have resisted as well as confirmed theory across the ages.

This book takes comedy seriously without taking it solemnly, and offers an engaging study of the comic spirit which lies at the heart of our shared social and cultural life.

Did people really speak like Bertie Wooster? Who was the celebrated Maisie? What does a Jubilee watering trough look like? Where is Loose Chippings? What was Just Like Mother Makes? Where does the exile from home splendour dazzles in vain come from? What was a gazeka? Why was Bertie Wooster more to be pitied than censured? When did young men-about-town start saying What? How did Bosher Street get its name? While P.G. Wodehouse's way with words has long set a standard for literary humour, much in his writing puzzles the modern reader. Volume Two of A Wodehouse Handbook answers many of the questions that arise when reading Wodehouse - especially the constant flow of quotations and deliberate misquotations that he used so skilfully. These range from the Bible and the Greek and Latin writers he knew so well, through Geoffrey Chaucer to writers like Ogden Nash and Mickey Spillane. Often he incorporated them into his stories so cunningly that the reader sometimes does not recognise them as quotations at all. Wodehouse also made a point of being up to date. From his first book in 1902 to his last in 1975, there are topical jokes, catchphrases, advertisements of the time and extracts from popular songs which everyone recognised when the books were published. In this volume, Norman Murphy explains the many references to people, places, and events that were appreciated by contemporary readers but are often mystifying today. He also identifies for us the myriad quotations that abound in Wodehouse's books and the songs, advertisements and long-forgotten catchphrases that Wodehouse used over seventy-five years. His findings, covering an extraordinary range of language and usage, from Aristotle to Variety magazine, will be of interest to all book-lovers and add to their appreciation and enjoyment of Wodehouse's superb writing.

New edition into the 'Things to do... series', packed with inspiring and original ideas and fun-filled tips and thought-provoking quotations to encourage the reader to live life to the full. A great impulse purchase!

Retirement is not the end of your working years but rather the start of something new. With more time on your hands than ever before, filling your days may seem harder than you expected and can leave you wondering 'exactly what do I do now?' This book provides a wide range of upbeat suggestions on ways to luxuriate in your new-found time. Whether it is learning a new language, taking up a new hobby or simply spending more time with friends and family, this book is packed with inspirational ideas. It aims to encourage readers to make the most of their retirement, to appreciate the extra time they have to spend pursuing activities they enjoy and exploring new ones. As well as a force for encouraging you to make the most of every opportunity, this book will make suggestions for how to come to terms with yourself, your friends and your family in this new phase of your life.

The De Gruyter Handbook of Humor Studies consolidates the cumulative contributions in theory and research on humor from 57 international scholars representing 21 different countries in the widest possible diversity of disciplines. It organizes research in a unique conceptual framework addressing two broad themes: the Essence of Humor and the Functions of Humor. Furthermore, scholars of humor have recognized that humor is not only a universal human experience, it is also inherently social, shared among people and woven into the fabric of nearly every type of interpersonal relationship.

Scholars across all academic disciplines have addressed questions about the essence and functions of humor at different levels of analysis relating to how narrowly or broadly they conceptualize the social context of humor. Accordingly, the editors have organized each broad thematic section into three subsections defined by level of analysis. The book first addresses questions about individual psychological processes, then discusses text properties, and finally moves to questions involving broader conceptualizations of the social context addressing humor and social relations, as well as humor and culture.

By providing a comprehensive review of foundational work as well as new research and theoretical advancements across academic disciplines, the De Gruyter Handbook of Humor Studies will serve as the foremost authoritative research handbook for experienced humor scholars as well as an essential starting point for newcomers to the field, such as graduate students seeking to conduct their own research on humor. Further, by highlighting the interdisciplinary interest of new and emerging areas of research the book identifies and defines directions for future research for scholars from every discipline that contributes to our understanding of humor.

Poking fun at Victorian social clubs became a way of asserting and redefining social belonging. At the turn of the century, amid intense social change, the club became the subject of sustained humour in the Idler magazine and its circle, from editors Jerome K. Jerome and Robert Barr to J. M. Barrie, Arthur Conan Doyle, Barry Pain, Israel Zangwill, and even P. G. Wodehouse. Rather than doing away with the club itself, these authors embraced the paradoxes of the club and re-defined it as a space of possibility. Their humorous, fictional clubs aided the social mobility of the authors who created them, who in turn served as models for the readers who might never cross the literal thresholds of Clubland.

This tour de force by a master of experimental novels finds the author reflecting on her old age and its effects on her writing. As she reflects on her own career, her experiments with narrative, and on the narrative she writes here, she ultimately reasserts herself and accepts the life behind her.

King Solomon's Mines (1885) is a popular novel 1] by the Victorian adventure writer and fabulist Sir H. Rider Haggard. It tells of a search of an unexplored region of Africa by a group of adventurers led by Allan Quatermain for the missing brother of one of the party. It is the first English adventure novel set in Africa, and is considered to be the genesis of the Lost World literary genre.

Aforismos, greguer as, humor, e iron a. Ag tese antes de usar. Puede producir sonrisas y arco ris en el alma.

Women and Comedy: History, Theory, Practice brings together leading researchers from Canada, the United States, and Europe in an interdisciplinary collection of essays to chart the future of critical inquiry in gender and comedy studies.

Humor is the tendency of particular cognitive experiences to provoke laughter and provide amusement. Throughout history, it has played a crucial role in defining gender roles and identities. This collection offers an in-depth thematic examination of this relationship between humor and gender, spanning a variety of historical and cultural backdrops.

Nothing in the understanding of humor is as simple as it might seem. In Joking Asides, Elliott Oring confronts the problems of humor, analyzing the key contemporary approaches to its study and addressing controversial topics with new empirical data and insights.

A folklorist drawn to the study of humor, Oring developed his formulation of appropriate incongruity as a frame to understand what jokes must do to produce humor. He tests appropriate incongruity against other major positions in the field, including the general theory of verbal humor, conceptual integration theory, benign violation theory, and false-belief theory. Oring draws on the work of scholars from several disciplines-anthropology, folklore, philosophy, psychology, linguistics, and literature-to ask basic questions about the construction and evolution of jokes, untangle the matter of who the actual targets of a joke might be, and characterize the artistic qualities of jokes and joke performances.

Although Oring guides the reader through a forest of jokes and joke genres, this is not a joke book. A major work from a major scholar, Joking Asides is a rigorous exploration of theoretical approaches to jokes and their functions and is filled with disquieting questions, penetrating criticisms, and original observations. Written in a clear and accessible style, this book will prove valuable to any scholar or student who takes matters of jokes and joking seriously.

This delightful little paperback consists of humorously inventive fictionalized artist statements. The recent explosion of interest in academic art programs around the world has led to a dramatic increase in overwritten, hyperbolic artist statements. I Write Artist Statements skewers popular art school clich s while describing impossible projects that simply could not exist off of the printed page.

What is satire? How can we define it? Is it a weapon for radical change or fundamentally conservative? Is satire funny or cruel? Does it always need a target or victim? Combining thematic, theoretical and historical approaches, John T. Gilmore introduces and investigates the tradition of satire from classical models through to the present day. In a lucid and engaging style, Gilmore explores:

• the moral politics of satire
• whether satire is universal, historically or geographically limited
• how satire translates across genres and media

• the boundaries of free speech and legitimacy.

Using examples from ancient Egypt to Charlie Hebdo, from European traditions of formal verse satire to imaginary voyages and alternative universes, newspaper cartoons and YouTube clips, from the Caribbean to China, this comprehensive volume should be of interest to students and scholars of literature, media and cultural studies as well as politics and philosophy.

Offering both the first major revision of satiric rhetoric in decades and a critical account of the modern history of satire criticism, Fredric V. Bogel maintains that the central structure of the satiric mode has been misunderstood. Devoting attention to Augustan satiric texts and other examples of satire--from writings by Ben Jonson and Lord Byron to recent performance art--Bogel finds a complicated interaction between identification and distance, intimacy and repudiation.Drawing on anthropological insights and the writings of Kenneth Burke, Bogel articulates a rigorous, richly developed theory of satire. While accepting the view that the mode is built on the tension between satirist and satiric object, he asserts that an equally crucial relationship between the two is that of intimacy and identification; satire does not merely register a difference and proceed to attack in light of that difference. Rather, it must establish or produce difference.The book provides fresh analyses of eighteenth-century texts by Jonathan Swift, John Gay, Alexander Pope, Henry Fielding, and others. Bogel believes that the obsessive play between identification and distance and the fascination with imitation, parody, and mimicry which mark eighteenth-century satire are part of a larger cultural phenomenon in the Augustan era--a questioning of the very status of the category and of categorical distinctness and opposition.

Thomas Mann predicted that no manner or mode in literature would be so typical or so pervasive in the twentieth century as the grotesque. Assuredly he was correct. The subjects and methods of our comic literature (and much of our other literature) are regularly disturbing and often repulsive-no laughing matter. In this ambitious study, John R. Clark seeks to elucidate the major tactics and topics deployed in modern literary dark humor. In Part I he explores the satiric strategies of authors of