S J Perelman Writings Loa 346

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.

A collection of works by one of America's most popular humorists offers his unique perspective on books, movies, New York socialites, the newspaper business, country life, travel, Hollywood, the publishing industry, and himself.

Including stories, letters, memoirs, and journalism, "Americans in Paris" distills three centuries of vigorous, glittering, and powerfully emotional writing about the place that Henry James called "the most brilliant city in the world."

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.

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.

Self-reference, although a topic studied by some philosophers and known to a number of other disciplines, has received comparatively little explicit attention. For the most part the focus of studies of self-reference has been on its logical and linguistic aspects, with perhaps disproportionate emphasis placed on the reflexive paradoxes. The eight-volume Macmillan Encyclopedia of Philosophy, for example, does not contain a single entry in its index under "self-reference", and in connection with "reflexivity" mentions only "relations", "classes", and "sets". Yet, in this volume, the introductory essay identifies some 75 varieties and occurrences of self-reference in a wide range of disciplines, and the bibliography contains more than 1,200 citations to English language works about reflexivity. The contributed papers investigate a number of forms and applications of self-reference, and examine some of the challenges posed by its difficult temperament. The editors hope that readers of this volume will gain a richer sense of the sti11largely unexplored frontiers of reflexivity, and of the indispensability of reflexive concepts and methods to foundational inquiries in philosophy, logic, language, and into the freedom, personality and intelligence of persons.