Dorothy Parkerâs complete weekly New Yorker column about books and people and the rigors of reviewing.
When, in 1927, Dorothy Parker became a book critic for the New Yorker, she was already a legendary wit, a much-quoted member of the Algonquin Round Table, and an arbiter of literary taste. In the year that she spent as a weekly reviewer, under the rubric âConstant Reader,â she created what is still the most entertaining book column ever written. Parkerâs hot takes have lost none of their heat, whether sheâs taking aim at the evangelist Aimee Semple MacPherson (âShe can go on like that for hours. Can, hellâdoesâ), praising Hemingwayâs latest collection (âHe discards detail with magnificent lavishnessâ), or dissenting from the Tao of Pooh (âAnd it is that word âhummy,â my darlings, that marks the first place in The House at Pooh Corner at which Tonstant Weader Fwowed upâ).
Introduced with characteristic wit and sympathy by Sloane Crosley, Constant Reader gathers the complete weekly New Yorker reviews that Parker published from October 1927 through November 1928, with gimlet-eyed appreciations of the high and low, from Isadora Duncan to Al Smith, Charles Lindbergh to Little Orphan Annie, Mussolini to Emily Post