Parker is unquestionably the queen, but I prefer her in snippets. Taken as a whole the stories are too much the same, and make me want to tear my hair in frustration at the limitations placed on women's lives.
( )

paperback

I read about half of this book on a cross country plane ride, San Francisco to Rochester NY with a stop in Charlotte NC. I had heard of Dorothy Parker and the Algonquin Round table but I don't think I ever read any of her work. The Portable Dorothy Parker is over five hundred pages long. She wrote poetry, short stories, literary criticism and screen plays. This book is limited to her poems and short stories.A great aunt admired Dorothy Parker. When I was quite young my aunt told me how Miss Parker was witty and clever and had a sign that said Gentlemen over the door of her office at the New Yorker. It caused some confusion. Her wit certainly shows in both her short stories and poems. The poems are often dark and touch on themes of relationships gone bad. In several short stories Parker uses the device of telling just one side of a conversation. Not many authors could pull that off but she did. My copy of the Viking Portable Dorothy Parker is the 1944 edition with an introduction by W. Somerset Maugham. Maugham and others have said that her short story Big Blonde is her best effort but I though many of her others were just as well done. ( )

I chanced open this book a day before I was to leave for a road trip, and boy am I glad! I am in love with Ms. Parker. Her style of writing is brilliant, and so is her wit. I was never a big fan of short stories until I read this book, and I was hooked. Ms. Parker has a very keen sense of understanding human emotions, and you can see that in the way she has (very cleverly) portrayed it through her characters. And each story has a different theme. Where there is one story that makes you hysterical when you are riding the bus to work (it happened with me, people were looking at me funny as if I had the Monday Morning Blues), there is one that makes you retrospect such times with a heavy heart. Oh what a delight this book is!
I read this book out aloud to my sister while on our road trip, I have many beautiful memories with it.
I would recommend this book. ( )

Dorothy Parker is one of those writers I've heard about long before I've actually read their work. The lady definitely lives up to her reputation as a master of language and wit. The picture she paints of early 20th Century New York is fascinating, but her constant theme of irony and heartbreak gets tiresome after a while. So I took my time perusing this 544 page volume of poems and short stories. I'm debating whether to keep it or not. On one hand, I don't see myself pulling it off the shelf too often, but on the other, a short cutting poem might be just the thing to spice up an otherwise drab day.
--J. ( )