Download or read book The Cat s Pajamas Witch s Milk written by Peter De Vries and published by . This book was released on 1969 with total page 303 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Cat s Pajamas and Witch s Milk written by Peter De Vries and published by Open Road Media. This book was released on 2014-10-21 with total page 190 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Twin tales of middle-class hilarity and despair from the writer who was dubbed “America’s preeminent comic novelist” by the New York Times When college professor Hank Tattersall sees his former flame, Lucy Stiles, at a campus concert, it sets off a chain reaction that results in one of the funniest and most unforgettable exit scenes in American literature—involving a locked door, an alcoholic dog, and a punning doppelgänger. The Cat’s Pajamas is the story of how Tattersall, a scrupulous self-reflector, falls from point A to point Z, rushing through a host of identities and indignities along the way. The unexamined life may not be worth living, he discovers, but the examined one is hardly a bed of roses. In Witch’s Milk, Tillie Seltzer has her own trials to attend to. Chief among them is her marriage to Pete, the kind of guy who tucks a cigarette behind his ear and calls everybody Frisbee. When they first met, Tillie had more sophisticated tastes—dark strangers, homburg hats—but she was also a thirtysomething virgin whose prospects weren’t getting any better. When she cracked a joke about the honeymoon being over, Pete believed her. Now stuck in suburbia with a sick child and a philandering husband, Tillie takes a hard look in the rearview mirror. Her search for an escape route will lead her to the most unexpected place of all. These short novels are linked by Tillie’s cameo appearance in Hank’s narrative and by the thrilling blend of satire, tragedy, and philosophy that defines the one-of-a-kind fiction of Peter De Vries.
Download or read book The Cat s Pajamas Witch s Milk written by Peter De Vries and published by . This book was released on 1969 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book LIFE written by and published by . This book was released on 1968-12-13 with total page 126 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: LIFE Magazine is the treasured photographic magazine that chronicled the 20th Century. It now lives on at LIFE.com, the largest, most amazing collection of professional photography on the internet. Users can browse, search and view photos of today’s people and events. They have free access to share, print and post images for personal use.
Download or read book Comfort Me with Apples written by Peter De Vries and published by Open Road Media. This book was released on 2014-10-21 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A laugh-out-loud novel about teenage pretensions and adult delusions from an author whom the New York Times has called “a Balzac of the station wagon set” Chick Swallow and his best friend, Nickie Sherman, are teenage boulevardiers of Decency, Connecticut, devotees of Oscar Wilde who spend their evenings crafting perverse aphorisms in an ice-cream parlor. “There is only one thing worse than not having children,” opines Chick, “and that is having them.” Unrepentant aesthetes, someday soon they will be in Paris or New York, far removed from the mainstream. Then the unthinkable happens. Marriage. Family. Dinner parties. For Chick, a job at the local newspaper writing an advice column punctuated by blandly inspirational Pepigrams: “To turn stumbling blocks into stepping stones—pick up your feet.” For Nickie, an unlikely career in law enforcement. But just when it seems that their lives have settled down before they could even begin, Chick begins an affair with Mrs. Thicknesse, a newspaper music critic of ample girth and means, and a whole brouhaha breaks loose: blackmail, forgery, secret sleuthing, lawsuits. There is drama in suburbia after all, and Chick and Nickie are up to their necks in it. A wild, witty tale of friendship, marriage, and infidelity, Comfort Me with Apples is full of the brilliant wordplay and delicious ironies that made Peter de Vries “one of the best comic novelists that America has ever produced” (Commentary).
Download or read book The Tents of Wickedness written by Peter De Vries and published by Open Road Media. This book was released on 2014-10-21 with total page 222 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A masterwork of literary parody about a suburban Samaritan and the poet he seeks to inspire After the wild adventures of Comfort Me with Apples, Chick Swallow has found domestic peace in Decency, Connecticut, accepting his fate as a middle-class husband and father and the author of an advice column in the local newspaper. His hard-won contentment is about to disappear like warm water down a bathtub drain, however, when fate intervenes to reunite our hero with Sweetie Appleyard, a childhood playmate with whom he once shared an intimate moment in a coal bin. All these years later, Sweetie is just as devoted to art and allergic to the real world as she always was. In an effort to bring Sweetie out of her treehouse and urge her on with her life, Chick helps to get a book of her poetry published. But his plan backfires hilariously when Sweetie, with stunning alacrity, becomes the toast of Greenwich Village, tires of the up-all-night bohemian life, and decides that she wants to be a mother. For the father, she has two possibilities in mind: her literary patron or his brother-in-law, Nickie Sherman. To save his sister’s marriage, Chick will risk his own and pray that, for once, he can keep everything under control. With a stylistic ingenuity unmatched in modern American fiction, De Vries parodies a dozen different writers in this boisterous tale of New England angst. William Faulkner, Theodore Dreiser, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Marcel Proust, Emily Dickinson, and Dylan Thomas all make uproarious appearances in The Tents of Wickedness as it gleefully skewers pretensions of every stripe.
Download or read book Let Me Count the Ways written by Peter De Vries and published by Open Road Media. This book was released on 2014-10-21 with total page 221 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The sins of the father are hilariously visited on the son in this witty and profound novel about the meaning of it all Stanley Waltz is a Polish American piano mover and pugnacious atheist married to a born-again believer. His heroes are H. L. Mencken and Clarence Darrow, and if he confuses “illusion” with “allusion” and thinks a certain style of egg is “bedeviled,” that does not mean his reasoning is any less sound. Unfortunately, his wife is immune to his intellect and insists not just on saving his soul but on taking their son, Tom, to the local gospel mission every chance she gets. It is enough to drive a man into the arms of a mistress “funny as a crutch and twice as perceptive”—and that is exactly where Stan goes. This leaves Tom twice as mixed up as the average son. In the second section of this side-splitting and thought-provoking comedy, he is a professor of English at the local college, his questions about faith, doubt, and morality as unresolved as they are inescapable. As an undergraduate, he stumbled from girl to girl, breaking up with one because she was a nonbeliever, another because she was too pious. His marriage to a beautiful professor of comparative religion is no solution. In short order, he has an affair, breaks his leg, leads a funeral procession hopelessly astray, and suffers a nervous breakdown. Only a miracle can save him—if he can figure out what one might look like. Stanley and Tom Waltz are a father-son duo unlike any other, and Let Me Count the Ways is Peter De Vries at his insightful, brilliant, lightning-witted best.
Download or read book Bulletin of Bibliography written by and published by . This book was released on 1982 with total page 544 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Peter De Vries and Surrealism written by Dan Campion and published by Bucknell University Press. This book was released on 1995 with total page 254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: De Vries's style and narrative technique are often surrealistic, and he mentions surrealism and surrealists in all but two of his twenty-six books. Yet, in fifty years of commentary on De Vries, scarcely any notice has been taken of these surrealist elements.
Download or read book The Blood of the Lamb written by Peter De Vries and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2012-04-26 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This autobiographical novel of family tragedy by the author of Slouching Towards Kalamazoo “moves deftly from manic hilarity to manic fury, and back again” (Newsday). The most poignant of Peter De Vries’s novels, The Blood of the Lamb is also his most personal. It follows the life of Don Wanderhop from his childhood in an immigrant Calvinist family living in Chicago in the 1950s through the loss of a brother, his faith, his wife, and finally his daughter—a tragedy drawn directly from De Vries’s own life. Despite its basis in personal tragedy, The Blood of the Lamb offers glimpses of the comic sensibility for which De Vries was famous. Written with a powerful blend of grief, love, wit, and fury, De Vries’s “sensitive treatment of the death of a beloved child it has scarcely a superior in contemporary fiction" (Chicago Tribune).
Download or read book Beyond the Margins written by Linda A. Bell and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2012-02-01 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Presenting essays rich with her own personal experiences, philosopher Linda A. Bell examines not only her own life but also problems arising from ways that living affects thinking. She reflects on her own experience in order to challenge a variety of provocative claims, including: that affirmative action harms those it is designed to help; that suicide, while perhaps acceptable for some with fatal diseases, is otherwise a manifestation of mental illness; that women are to blame for male violence toward them if they don't leave the relationships; that a low profile is the best path to success for women in academe; that women are treated fairly in academe, perhaps even better than men; and that "political correctness" is a recent and aberrant move away from respect for freedom of speech. Although drawing from experience as she creates and critiques theory, Bell argues against the view that it is the bedrock of theory.
Download or read book Dutch Calvinism in Modern America written by James D. Bratt and published by Wipf and Stock Publishers. This book was released on 2002-12-30 with total page 369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this scholarly yet entertaining book, James D. Bratt takes a look at the Dutch in America from the late 19th century to the present. A comprehensive study of an ethnic subculture, the book is in large part a study of the group's religious history as well, since, as Bratt points out, the contours of the Dutch presence in America have been overwhelmingly shaped by the church and its subsidiary organizations. Although the book is extensively and scrupulously documented, Bratt has infused his scholarship with a considerable amount of anecdote that is by turns poignant and tragic and hilarious. In Bratt's analysis of the fitful progress of Americanization that this close-knit religious community has undergone, we are treated to the sharp insights of a bemused and sometimes disaffected insider. Included is a chapter on novelists Arnold Mulder, David Cornel DeJong, Frederick Manfred, and Peter DeVries - four sons of the Dutch who fled the subculture only to reflect upon it almost obsessively from the outside. Well written, scholarly, and highly readable, 'Dutch Calvinism In Modern America' will have wide appeal among both academic and general readers.
Download or read book The Films of Martin Ritt written by Gabriel Miller and published by Univ. Press of Mississippi. This book was released on 2000 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Wit in English written by Paul Joel Freeman and published by Xlibris Corporation. This book was released on 2009-12-18 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: There is no available information at this time.
Download or read book Encyclopedia of American Humorists written by Steven H. Gale and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-04-14 with total page 1324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First published in 1988, this book contains entries on famous American Humorists. Humor has been present in American literature, from the beginning, and has developed characteristics that reflect the American character, both regional and national. Although American literature was, in the past, treated as inferior to British literature, there has always been a large popular audience for the genre, which this book shows. The figures with entries in this encyclopedia not only amuse in their writing, but also aim to enlighten- setting out to expose the foibles and foolishness of society and the individuals who compose it. It is the manner in which these authors try to accomplish this end that determines whether they appear in the volume. Indeed, the book will demonstrate that the best humor has at its base, a ready understanding of human nature.
Download or read book The Glory and the Dream written by William Manchester and published by Rosetta Books. This book was released on 2013-11-12 with total page 2245 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A New York Times–bestselling historian’s in-depth portrait of life in America, from the Depression era to the early 1970s: “Magnificent” (The New York Times). Award-winning historian and biographer William Manchester, author of The Last Lion, an epic three-volume biography of Winston Churchill, brings us an evocative exploration of the American way of life from 1932 to 1972. Covering almost every facet of American culture during a very diverse and tumultuous period in history, Manchester’s account is both dramatic and surprisingly intimate—with compelling details that could only be known by a dedicated historian who lived through and documented this fascinating time. It’s an enlightening, affecting, and highly entertaining journey through four extraordinary decades in the life of America. “There is no fiction that can compete with good, gossipy, anecdotal history—the inside story of who said or did what in moments of great tensions or crisis . . . I think you ought to read this history and weep, read it and laugh, read it and don’t repeat it.” —Anatole Broyard
Download or read book Without a Stitch in Time written by Peter De Vries and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2014-11-17 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Harking from the golden age of fiction set in American suburbia—the school of John Updike and Cheever—this work from the great American humorist Peter De Vries looks with laughter upon its lawns, its cocktails, and its slightly unreal feeling of comfort. Without a Stitch in Time, a selection of forty-six articles and stories written for the New Yorker between 1943 and 1973, offers pun-filled autobiographical vignettes that reveal the source of De Vries’s nervous wit: the cognitive dissonance between his Calvinist upbringing in 1920s Chicago and the all-too-perfect postwar world. Noted as much for his verbal fluidity and wordplay as for his ability to see humor through pain, De Vries will delight both new readers and old in this uproarious modern masterpiece.
