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Parker: Selected Stories

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Parker: Selected Stories

By: Dorothy Parker
Narrated by: Elaine Stritch
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About this listen

Dorothy Parker's quips and light verse have embedded themselves in the American literary landscape, but it was her prose that proved her star and demonstrated her talent as extending far beyond her time. In her fiction, she not only brought to life the urban milieu that was her bailiwick, but lay bare the uncertainties of ordinary people living ordinary lives, all told in her unflinching and deeply personal voice.

In these selected stories, read for you by Elaine Stritch, we have the chance to draw upon her insight into the social and emotional realities of human nature. The following stories are featured in this audiobook collection:

  • "Big Blonde"
  • "Too Bad"
  • "The Song of the Shirt"
  • "Mr. Durant"
  • "From the Diary of a New York Lady"
  • "The Standard of Living"
  • "The Garter"
©1924, 1928, 1929, 1933, 1941 The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. These stories are selected from Complete Stories by Dorothy Parker, edited by Colleen Breese (Penguin Books, 1993). “Too Bad” first appeared in Smart Set; “Mr. Durant” in American Mercury; and “Big Blonde” in The Bookman. The other stories were first published in The New Yorker. (P)2018 Penguin Audio
Classics Literary Fiction

Critic Reviews

"There have been other recordings of Parker's stories, several very good. But this is a particularly happy pairing of subject and reader. Stritch's famous whiskey tenor does the stories - with their glossy exteriors and yearning hearts - justice. Sympathy is always lurking in her voice, especially for Parker's female characters, but you can't stop and wallow; there's the next quip to get to, the next coping mechanism. A life in musical comedy brings timing and acidity to the brittle society antics of "Too Bad" or "The Standard of Living". And there is a poignancy, too, to the deep and rueful knowledge of the ravages of alcohol laid so bare in "Big Blonde". In case you're worried Stritch's personality overpowers Parker’s material, don't be; she's too good an actor for that." (The New York Times Book Review)

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