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Rating: 
Summary: MORE RUNYON PLEASE !
Review: Damon Runyans writing is very amusing. He is sort of the American P.G. Woodhouse without all the spondulucks. His shorts also remind me of Roald Dahls in their twisted endings.
I wish someone would hunt up and publish all his newspaper columns and war correspondence.
Read his stories and you will be amazed at how often you recognize his plots in film. He was one of the great American writers and belongs in the same sentence as Twain Hemmingway Steinbeck and London.
Rating:
Summary: Classic stories in the most original voice
Review: Damon Runyon's collection of short stories was first published in the early 1930's - and lights up the seedy side of New York at that time. It is a world where all men seem to be shysters, gangsters, crooked lawyers, or somehow on the make - and all the women are Dolls. Runyon has the most wonderful voice - it is disarmingly confessionaly, sort of like you would expect a poorly educated but street smart gangster to talk in front of judge. So for instance in "Blood Pressure" which I think is one of the best stories he writes - "..Charley opens a door and we step into a room where there is a pretty red-headed doll about knee hight to a flivver, who looks as if she may just get out of the hay, because her red hair is flying every which way on her head, and her eyes seem still gummed up with sleep. At first I think she is a very cute sight indeed, and then I see something in her eyes that tells me this doll, whoever she is, is feeling very hostile to one and all." There are a great number of repeated characters that litter these tails, Nicely-Nicely, Regret, Dave the Dude - and everyone hangs around at Mindy's - a restaurant somewhere in New York. Nice, funny reads - Runyon and Saki rate as the two top short story writers ever.
Rating:
Summary: An American original
Review: I am sitting around one night years ago and my sister comes into the room and hands me these short stories and says ' you gotta read em' cause they got characters in them like Little Augie and Nibsy and ' the Walking Encyclopedia of Baseball Knowledge' and ' Posey' and 'Itchie Samiof ' and all the guys we know from Richman's gambling joint. So I sit down and I begin to read and its like these people on the page are the very spitting image very spitting of those we are meeting every day just on our corner . And these characters are very much like those my Uncles Jack and Reddy are inviting in the house all the time to play pinochle only even more funny and almost as nasty .So I say this book comes out of American life and is the genuine article although someone else tells me a lot of these guys most of been reading Damon Runyan and so started acting and talking like his characters just to make it seem that they are bigshots which is of course what they all are-when they are not broke which is most of the time.
Well this has not been a very successful effort at parody or paraphrase or whatever is, but it is a way of saying you will really really enjoy reading about ' Nicely Nicely' and 'Nathan Detroit ' and all the other Runyan characters. Ring Lardner may have been a smarter guy but old Damon Runyan why he could almost make colloquial as good as old JD Salinger would a little later from a bit further uptown.
Try it , try it you'll really really like it.
Rating: 
Summary: O. Henry, gangster-style
Review: I enjoyed most of this collection. I was reading it to help prepare for my role in an upcoming community theater production of "Guys and Dolls". I thought it might be helpful to see where the characters came from. So, I immediately skipped to "The Idyll of Miss Sarah Brown" and "Blood Pressure", as they were the basis for the musical. Both stories were good, the latter better, but still neither was the best. Those expecting the lightheartedness of the musical may be in for a bit of a surprise. There are certainly comical characters (Nicely-Nicely Jones, for example), moments, and even entire stories. But many are gritty with tough-as-nails characters who are desperate, down on their luck and apt to kill you for saying the wrong thing at the wrong time. The thing about Runyon is that he writes entirely in first person *present*. And while it is interesting at first, after a while it does become "more than somewhat" tiring, to use a phrase of his. In fact, I ripped through the first 200 pages loving the slang and weird colloquial nuances, only to grow a little sick of it until, by the last few stories, I just wanted to read something else. Not that the stories at the end are any less good. Maybe it's best not to try to read the whole thing all at once... Don't get me wrong, though. I really liked it, but I can only take so many short stories in a row. Most short stories in general seem so hackneyed to me, anyway. Like there has to be some big twist ending that is right out of the "O. Henry manual on short story writing". These are no different except that maybe they are a little more clever than average. A fun read (especially for anyone who's ever been in the show), but best taken in small doses. Oh yeah, and Adelaide is nowhere to be found...even though the back of the book mentions her name!
Rating:
Summary: O. Henry, gangster-style
Review: I enjoyed most of this collection. I was reading it to help prepare for my role in an upcoming community theater production of "Guys and Dolls". I thought it might be helpful to see where the characters came from. So, I immediately skipped to "The Idyll of Miss Sarah Brown" and "Blood Pressure", as they were the basis for the musical. Both stories were good, the latter better, but still neither was the best. Those expecting the lightheartedness of the musical may be in for a bit of a surprise. There are certainly comical characters (Nicely-Nicely Jones, for example), moments, and even entire stories. But many are gritty with tough-as-nails characters who are desperate, down on their luck and apt to kill you for saying the wrong thing at the wrong time. The thing about Runyon is that he writes entirely in first person *present*. And while it is interesting at first, after a while it does become "more than somewhat" tiring, to use a phrase of his. In fact, I ripped through the first 200 pages loving the slang and weird colloquial nuances, only to grow a little sick of it until, by the last few stories, I just wanted to read something else. Not that the stories at the end are any less good. Maybe it's best not to try to read the whole thing all at once... Don't get me wrong, though. I really liked it, but I can only take so many short stories in a row. Most short stories in general seem so hackneyed to me, anyway. Like there has to be some big twist ending that is right out of the "O. Henry manual on short story writing". These are no different except that maybe they are a little more clever than average. A fun read (especially for anyone who's ever been in the show), but best taken in small doses. Oh yeah, and Adelaide is nowhere to be found...even though the back of the book mentions her name!
Rating: 
Summary: Pleasant, leisure reading
Review: This is an excellent night-stand book. A collection of short stories,typical Damon Runyan. Most of its short stories can be read in twenty minutes or less. Some I found uninteresting, others delightful. My favorites are the "Lemon Drop Kid" and the baby sitting bank robber. A fun book for teen-agers also.W. Dannenmaier
Rating:
Summary: Pleasant, leisure reading
Review: This is an excellent night-stand book. A collection of short stories,typical Damon Runyan. Most of its short stories can be read in twenty minutes or less. Some I found uninteresting, others delightful. My favorites are the "Lemon Drop Kid" and the baby sitting bank robber. A fun book for teen-agers also.W. Dannenmaier
Rating:
Summary: Blue-ribbon Runyon is "more than somewhat" hilarious
Review: This is an intelligent compilation of Damon Runyon's short stories, dating from the late 1920s to the mid-1940s. The stories are very funny, peppered with the catchy slang of Runyon's small-time con artists, racetrack touts, Broadway characters, and guys who are "just around." You don't have to be a Runyon fan to enjoy such stories as "Broadway Incident" (drama critic Ambrose Hammer goes nightclubbing), "Madame La Gimp" (hoodlums pass off a bag lady as a society matron), "A Piece of Pie" (the gang wants to bet on Nicely-Nicely Johnson in an eating contest), "Delegates at Large" (Harry the Horse and his associates attend a political convention), "Hold 'Em, Yale" (the gang attends a "very large football game between the Harvards and the Yales"), and many more. "Most pleasant" reading for comedy fans.
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