The Best of Dorothy Parker

This selection draws on Dorothy Parker's verse and short fiction from the 1920s and 1930s. The poems are brief, epigrammatic pieces on love affairs that have already soured, hangovers, and the gap between what women are supposed to feel and what they say. The stories follow office workers, hotel residents, and married couples through parties, stalled conversations, and long afternoons of drink; several turn on a woman who cannot leave a bad arrangement. New York rooms and speakeasies are the usual settings. There is no continuous plot. The volume is a sampler of light-bitter lyric and story, not a novel and not a history of a single literary table.

Bound in silver plasticised cloth with a design in black by Smithson. Pale grey endleaves. Pale grey slipcase.