Conversations with S.J. Perelman

Conversations with S.J. Perelman PDF

Author: Sidney Joseph Perelman

Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi

Published: 1995

Total Pages: 164

ISBN-13: 9780878057900

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

For his seemingly effortless contributions to the world of humor and to an avid, exhilarated readership flourishing over six decades the New York Times Book Review declared him a national treasure.

S. J. Perelman: Writings (LOA #346)

S. J. Perelman: Writings (LOA #346) PDF

Author: S. J. Perelman

Publisher: Library of America

Published: 2021-08-24

Total Pages: 605

ISBN-13: 1598536931

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

Adam Gopnik presents the very best of S. J. Perelman, America's zaniest humorist. S. J. Perelman (1904-1979) wrote for the Marx Brothers films Horse Feathers and Monkey Business and won an Oscar for his screenwriting on Around the World in Eighty Days, but he remains best known for his many sketches and essays penned for The New Yorker during its golden age of humor. In these short comic pieces--Perelman called them feuilletons--his penchant for wordplay, witticism, spoofery, self-deprecation, and plain zaniness are on full display. The New York Times once noted his ability in these magazine pieces "to transform the common cliché or figure of speech into an exploding cigar." Author and New Yorker staff writer Adam Gopnik has selected the very best of them, including Perelman's parodies of books and films, his biting social satire, autobiographical pieces, and a selection from the celebrated Cloudland Revisited series, in which Perelman reminisces nostalgically about books and movies encountered in youth before describing in his inimitable hyperkinetic style the rude shock of revisiting them as an adult. Also included in this volume are the acclaimed play The Beauty Part (1963) from Perelman's Broadway career; profiles of the Marx Brothers, Dorothy Parker, and his brother-in-law Nathanael West; and a selection of letters written to correspondents such as Groucho Marx and Paul Theroux.

Best of S. J. Perelman

Best of S. J. Perelman PDF

Author: S. J. Perelman

Publisher: Createspace Independent Publishing Platform

Published: 2017-08-07

Total Pages: 452

ISBN-13: 9781974296231

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

In any consideration of S. J. Perelman-and S. J. Perelman certainly deserves the same consideration one accords old ladies on street cars, babies traveling unescorted on planes, and the feeble-minded generally-it is important to remember the crushing, the well-nigh intolerable odds under which the man has struggled to produce what may well be, in the verdict of history, the most picayune prose ever produced in America. Denied every advantage, beset and plagued by ill fortune and a disposition so crabbed as to make Alexander Pope and Dr. Johnson seem sunny by contrast, he has nevertheless managed to belt out a series of books each less distinguished than its predecessor, each a milestone of bombast, conceit, pedantry, and strutting pomposity. In his pages proliferate all the weird grammatical flora tabulated by H. W. Fowler in his Modem English Usage-the Elegant Variation, the Facetious Zeugma, the Cast-iron Idiom, the Battered Ornament, the BowerVBird Phrase, the Sturdy Indefensible, the Side-Slip, and the Unequal Yokefellow. His work is a museum of mediocrity, a monument to the truly banal. What Flaubert did to the French bourgeois in Bouvard and Pecuchet, what Pizarro did to the Incas, what Jack Dempsey did to Paolino Uzcudun, S. J. Perelman has done to American belles-lettres.

Don't Tread on Me

Don't Tread on Me PDF

Author: Sidney Joseph Perelman

Publisher: Penguin Group

Published: 1988

Total Pages: 414

ISBN-13: 9780140094824

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

Spanning the period from the late '20s to his death in 1979, these letters reveal a man with the skill to transform his multifarious resentments, jealousies, and insecurities into high verbal art. 8 pages of black-and-white photographs.

The Road to Miltown

The Road to Miltown PDF

Author: Sidney Joseph Perelman

Publisher:

Published: 1957

Total Pages: 300

ISBN-13:

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

This is a collection of the author's humorous short pieces that appeared over the years in The New Yorker magazine.

The World of S.J. Perelman

The World of S.J. Perelman PDF

Author: Sidney Joseph Perelman

Publisher:

Published: 2006-06-01

Total Pages: 336

ISBN-13: 9781853755941

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

Entering the warped world of SJ Perelman - the Marx brothers' greatest scriptwriter, amongst other things - is a unique comic experience. A satirist and parodist, his celebrated sketches lampoon the screaming absurdities of modern life and bring succour to that most persecuted minority of all: the embattled sane. The undoubted star of these sketches is Perelman's own put-upon fictional persona: all he craves is a little peace and quiet, yet he is continually pushed closer to the edge by those sent to try him. Written mainly for the New Yorker magazine, the sketches in this volume are a brand new selection of some of his finest pieces, many of which have been unavailable for decades. This collection covers every decade in which he wrote from the '30s to the '70s. His subversive wit seems as fresh today as it did when it first appeared and to many he is quite simply the most original and funniest humorist of the twentieth century.

The Dirty Dust

The Dirty Dust PDF

Author: Máirtín Ó Cadhain

Publisher: Yale University Press

Published: 2015-03-01

Total Pages: 328

ISBN-13: 030021359X

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

Máirtín Ó Cadhain’s irresistible and infamous novel The Dirty Dust is consistently ranked as the most important prose work in modern Irish, yet no translation for English-language readers has ever before been published. Alan Titley’s vigorous new translation, full of the brio and guts of Ó Cadhain’s original, at last brings the pleasures of this great satiric novel to the far wider audience it deserves. In The Dirty Dust all characters lie dead in their graves. This, however, does not impair their banter or their appetite for news of aboveground happenings from the recently arrived. Told entirely in dialogue, Ó Cadhain’s daring novel listens in on the gossip, rumors, backbiting, complaining, and obsessing of the local community. In the afterlife, it seems, the same old life goes on beneath the sod. Only nothing can be done about it—apart from talk. In this merciless yet comical portrayal of a closely bound community, Ó Cadhain remains keenly attuned to the absurdity of human behavior, the lilt of Irish gab, and the nasty, deceptive magic of human connection.

Acres and Pains

Acres and Pains PDF

Author: Sidney Joseph Perelman

Publisher:

Published: 1947

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9781580800167

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

Perelman's hilarious testament to the joys of owning country property, as he transforms from city lazybones to country squire at the family farm, Rising Gorge. Line drawings.

Razor Girl

Razor Girl PDF

Author: Carl Hiaasen

Publisher: Vintage Crime/Black Lizard

Published: 2019-05-28

Total Pages: 434

ISBN-13: 0525567186

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A lovable con woman and a disgraced detective team up to find a redneck reality TV star in this raucous new novel from the New York Times bestselling author of Squeeze Me. “Carl Hiaasen’s irresistible Razor Girl meets his usual sky-high standards for elegance, craziness and mike-drop humor.” —The New York Times Merry Mansfield, the eponymous Razor Girl, specializes in kidnapping for the mob. Her preferred method is rear-ending her targets and asking them for a ride. Her latest mark is Martin Trebeaux, owner of a private beach renourishment company who has delivered substandard sand to a mob hotel. But there's just one problem: Razor Girl hits the wrong guy. Instead, she ends up with Lane Coolman, talent manager for Buck Nance, the star of a reality TV show about a family of Cajun rooster farmers. Buck Nance, left to perform standup at a Key West bar without his handler, makes enough off-color jokes to incite a brawl, then flees for his life and vanishes.

Crazy Like a Fox

Crazy Like a Fox PDF

Author: S. J. Perelman

Publisher: Library of America

Published: 2024-04-23

Total Pages: 219

ISBN-13: 1598537792

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

A beloved classic returns: S. J. Perelman's own selection of the very best of his hilarious stories and sketches Pulitzer Prize–winning author Joshua Cohen (The Netanyahus) reintroduces America's zaniest humorist to a new generation of readers When asked about himself the writer Sidney Joseph Perelman once quipped, "before they made him, they broke the mold." Nowhere is S. J. Perelman's one-of-a-kind, madcap sensibility—his gift for wordplay, witticism, spoofery, and sheer nonsense—on better display than in his classic collection Crazy Like a Fox, here restored to print for the first time in decades. In a playful, loving tribute to the funny man, novelist Joshua Cohen—also an erudite wordsmith and punster—introduces Perelman’s sui generis comic pieces to a new generation of readers, certain to fall in love with the writer whom The New York Times once noted for his ability “to transform the common cliché or figure of speech into an exploding cigar.” Included here are such beloved classics as: the Joycean virtuoso performance “Scenario” “A Farewell to Omsk,” Perelman's hilarious homage to Dostoevsky and “Farewell, My Lovely Appetizer," his side-splitting send-up of the hardboiled detective fiction of Raymond Chandler Here is Perelman's own selection of the very best of his inimitable humor, restored to print for the first time in decades.