Rating: 
Summary: Very Biting & Very Funny
Review: I most like her very short stories & this is a great collection. They are almost scenes more than stories. In many of her writings, definitely in my favorites ("But the One on the Right"- about sitting next to a dud at a dinner party, "The Sexes"- about a date getting off on the wrong foot, "Here We Are"- about nervous newlyweds), Parker takes people's silent assumptions, adds dialogue riddled with miscommunication, then has her characters completely overanalyze the situation. What's left is very biting, very funny and gives loads of evidence to the saying that `assuming makes an ass out of you and me'.
Rating:
Summary: The most fun anyone ever had with anger
Review: I suspect that Dorothy Parker was angry most of the time. It certainly seems so from her writing. Yet she seems to have enjoyed the state of being angry more than any other writer I can think of. This excellent collection of her poetry and prose presents a brilliant cynical take on the world she inhabited. One we largely still inhabit. I have heard her condemned as a product of her time and place, but the insight and emotional connection that readers still feel from her jabs and verbal skewerings, is quite real and personal. She had a way of turning the pain in her life into a good joke - often at her own expense - expressed in a truely memorable way. She also could deflate others (especially in her reviews) with a skill that few writers have ever possessed. For those gifted with a little anger at the world, this book offers a brilliant collection of ways to express it.
Rating:
Summary: Great Satire, Great Wit
Review: If you love Dorothy Parker's stories, which I certainly do, you'll also love Diana Dell's "A Saigon Party: And Other Vietnam War Short Stories."
Rating:
Summary: Excuse My Ink
Review: It's not enough to say that Dorothy Parker was great, or that she was brilliant. It's hard to see from a distance her colossal impact on the literary world. When you buy this book (and you WILL buy it; these aren't the droids you're looking for) immediately read some of the very earliest stories. They are of WWI vintage or so. If you remember high school literature, short stories written just before Parker put pen to paper were the somewhat longer "chapter of a novel" type, of Guy de Maupassant, or W. Somerset Maugham. Dorothy Parker virtually invented the "slice of life" short story, which she brought to the New Yorker. This style became the standard of the fledgling magazine, popular with the public, and without a doubt helped get the magazine off the ground. This style is still the pervasive one today. Short stories were not all Mrs. Parker wrote. She wrote play reviews, and as Constant Reader book reviews. She could dismiss a play with "House Beautiful is Play Lousy," or take down her least favored AA Milne with "Tonstant Weader frowed up." She once spent the better part of a review complaining about her hang-over. She kept New Yorker readers coming back week after week, laugh junkies after a fix. And so she changed the voice of the reviewer as well. Previously, the reviewer voice had been detached and quite dry, rattling off obligatory lines about the costumes, the sets, the leading actor, the leading actress-- as predictable as the label on a shampoo bottle. The wonderful Libby Gelman-Waxner is her direct descendent. Pauline Kael is a niece, although she might have bristled at the suggestion. Andrew Harris and Elvis Mitchell can thank Mrs. Parker for their unfettered freedom. The best thing about reading this collection is discovering the sheer joy Mrs. Parker took in writing. She was good and she knew it. She once said, in reviewing the unfortunate book Debonair, that the curse of a satirist is that "she writes superbly of the things she hates," but when she tries to write of things she likes, "the result is appalling." Personally, I find Parker moving and eloquent in her reviews of the Journal of Katherine Mansfield, and Isadora Duncan's posthumously published autobiography, two books that touched and impressed her, but it is true that her distinctive voice croons most seductively when she doesn't like something. Unfortunately, one is left with the impression that she didn't like much other than gin, Seconal and dogs, but I don't think that's true. If she were as unhappy as is commonly believed, she would have escalated her suicidal behavior, and not have lived to the age of 74. She would not have had the passion to march for the acquittal of Sacco and Venzetti, to travel to Spain during the country's civil war, to volunteer as a war correspondent during WWII, and to join in voice and body the civil rights movement in her last decade. I think disdain rather than anger is a better word for what she felt towards the targets of her wit-- and it is true that sometimes a retrospective view of her own behavior was the target, but the ability to laugh at oneself is the sign of, well, if not mental health, at least a well-rounded emotional self. And by the way, since Parker had no heirs, she left her estate, including future earnings from her work, to Dr. Martin Luther King jr., and when he sadly died the year after she did, he passed on the right to profit from the Parker works to the NAACP, so for every copy of this book sold, the author's cut profits the NAACP.
Rating:
Summary: Sardonic Wit, Whimsy and Heart
Review: Lips that taste of tears, they say,
Are the best for kissing. ~Dorothy Parker
Dorothy Parker died the year I was born and yet she seems like a modern writer you'd like to meet and talk to for hours. While she lived a troubled life she is a fascinating study. While in France she became friends with Earnest Hemingway and soon thereafter published her first book of poetry, "Enough Rope." She writes about her friendship with Earnest in the Uncollected Articles section.
Of all her writing, her poems strike me as her true self. She reveals so much in her poetry and many times her feelings reach new levels of desperation. She doesn't seem to find as many beautiful moments as Anais Nin, but then again she manages to continue the struggle of life without taking her life in a river like Virginia Woolf.
The true irony of her life is that she dies of natural causes after spending a life embraced in a dream of death. When she wishes people were dead, it might be because she sees death as some beautiful way to escape reality.
The memorable short stories make extended points about human nature and page 48 is an especially good example of a page dripping heavily with sardonic wit. Where did all this angst come from? She is a woman living in a time where she cannot always speak her mind and she is deeply frustrated in many of her "internal dialogue" confessions.
When given the choice between creating and curing, she seems to create from a place of deep emotional pain. She seems to fall into similar patterns and actually seems to revel the idea of: "I wore my heart like a wet, red stain on the breast of a velvet gown."
Dorothy Parker's poems seem to be more of her desire to break free from the brutal revelation of life. She has a typical love-hate relationship with men and is an astute observer of cultural trends. I have a feeling she wrote many of her poems while she was in a manic state of some sort because she reveals so many of her feelings and comments so deeply on her life experience. The first few lines of "Wisdom," show her frustration.
This I say, and this I know:
Love has seen the last of me.
Love's a trodden lane to woe,
Love's a path to misery.
She seems to be having a bipolar diatribe during the story of the Telephone Call. Her mean streak can be a bit shocking at times, but she does love rain and has other sensitive qualities which seem to balance this more sarcastic and vindictive side of her personality.
Dorothy Parker wrote reviews under the title "The Constant Reader." There are quite a few reviews from The New Yorker. She reviews The Journal of Katherine Mansfield and We Have Always Lived in a Castle by Shirley Jackson. I enjoyed her conversational style and the way she thinks through her writing while she writes. It is as if you are observing the entire thought process. You can read her thoughts about Oscar Wilde's An Ideal Husband from Vanity Fair.
One of my friends reads me Hemingway and I read him Dorothy Parker poems. It is a friendship made in heaven. He also knows all about Dorothy Parker and the Algonquin Round Table and has lists of books for me to read. This book is my first Dorothy Parker experience and I found many poems that I loved and quotes that are definitely collectable. This is an enjoyable introduction to Dorothy Parker that may end up with many highlighted pages.
~TheRebeccaReview.com
The other Constant Reader ;) I kid.
The Wall Street Journal article title, October 21, 2002
Rating:
Summary: One Perfect Rose After Another
Review: On one occasion, when challenged by a friend to use the word 'horticulture' in a sentence, Dorothy Parker replied "You can lead a horticulture, but you can't make her think." Possessed of a razor sharp intelligence and a wicked turn of phrase, she stands as perhaps the single finest American wit and humorist of the early 20th Century. This expanded edition of THE PORTABLE DOROTHY PARKER collects all three of her volumes of poetry, both volumes of her collected short stories, and a great deal more besides--all of it guaranteed to give readers hour after delightful hour. Like her contemporary and only serious competitor James Thurber, Parker's work often focused on the battle of the sexes, and many of her short stories--such as "Dusk Before Fireworks," "You Were Perfectly Fine," and "Here We Are"--present savagely funny portaits of couples who are on the edge in more ways than one. She is also extremely famous for her 'monologue' stories, particularly "Telephone Call," in which the reader essentially overhears the thoughts of the character it portrays. But she is perhaps best remembered for her sharply comic poetry, which is typically written as a subverted 'jingle' that goes unexpectedly awry, often in the most morbid way imaginable; "One Perfect Rose" and "You Might As Well Live," to name but two, have been standards of American poetry collections since they were first published. And no theatrical critic has ever equalled Parker for sheer comic acidity. But Parker was not simply a humorist. While a number of her poems address deeper subjects--"Rainy Night" is particularly memorable--many of her short stories are intensely dramatic. "Big Blonde" details the slow decline of a woman who is passed from man to man, never finding happiness and drifting into alcoholism and attempted suicide; "Clothe the Naked" presents a touching portrait of a black woman struggling to survive in a hostile white world. Her eye for detail is remarkable; her style is distinctly her own, a mixture of the clinical and the wryly comic; be it comic or tragic, she is in full command of her art in every selection. This is one that belongs on your shelf, no question about it. Strongly, strongly recommended.
Rating:
Summary: One Perfect Rose After Another
Review: On one occasion, when challenged by a friend to use the word 'horticulture' in a sentence, Dorothy Parker replied "You can lead a horticulture, but you can't make her think." Possessed of a razor sharp intelligence and a wicked turn of phrase, she stands as perhaps the single finest American wit and humorist of the early 20th Century. This expanded edition of THE PORTABLE DOROTHY PARKER collects all three of her volumes of poetry, both volumes of her collected short stories, and a great deal more besides--all of it guaranteed to give readers hour after delightful hour. Like her contemporary and only serious competitor James Thurber, Parker's work often focused on the battle of the sexes, and many of her short stories--such as "Dusk Before Fireworks," "You Were Perfectly Fine," and "Here We Are"--present savagely funny portaits of couples who are on the edge in more ways than one. She is also extremely famous for her 'monologue' stories, particularly "Telephone Call," in which the reader essentially overhears the thoughts of the character it portrays. But she is perhaps best remembered for her sharply comic poetry, which is typically written as a subverted 'jingle' that goes unexpectedly awry, often in the most morbid way imaginable; "One Perfect Rose" and "You Might As Well Live," to name but two, have been standards of American poetry collections since they were first published. And no theatrical critic has ever equalled Parker for sheer comic acidity. But Parker was not simply a humorist. While a number of her poems address deeper subjects--"Rainy Night" is particularly memorable--many of her short stories are intensely dramatic. "Big Blonde" details the slow decline of a woman who is passed from man to man, never finding happiness and drifting into alcoholism and attempted suicide; "Clothe the Naked" presents a touching portrait of a black woman struggling to survive in a hostile white world. Her eye for detail is remarkable; her style is distinctly her own, a mixture of the clinical and the wryly comic; be it comic or tragic, she is in full command of her art in every selection. This is one that belongs on your shelf, no question about it. Strongly, strongly recommended.
Rating:
Summary: great
Review: Parker's poems are short, sparse, and witty; I can hardly ever sit down with this book and not feel compelled to read a particulary memorable gem aloud. Her short stories reveal surprising depth, and her "Constant Reader" reviews (especially the AA Milne ones!) are a real riot. I've found that it's an excellent bedside companion.
Rating:
Summary: a classic favorite
Review: This has been one of my "always by my side" books for several years now. The short stories are ironic and witty, the poetry is amazing. Of everything, I would probably say the best part of this collection is the poetry. Ms. Parker has a brilliant sense of humor and she reveals an essence of feminism one can relish for years to come.
Rating:
Summary: A Tonic
Review: This is a marvelous introduction to the writings of Dorothy Parker, one which will doubtlessly lead you to more. Although barbed with language as pointed as thorns and smacking of venomous wit, Mrs. Parker's poetry and prose are a tonic for those who have been wounded by life but are too enamoured of it to loosen their embrace. These selections have astringent properties: they sting, they smart (they smarten!), they cleanse. Yet they also have the three things Mrs. Parker vowed she would have till the day she should die: "laughter and hope and a sock in the eye." By god, Mrs. Parker was one smart, sweet, tough cookie.
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