Constant Reader: The New Yorker Columns 1927–28

When Dorothy Parker became a book critic for The New Yorker in 1927, 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 byline “Constant Reader,” she created what is still the most entertaining book column ever written. Parker’s hot takes have lost none of their heat, whether she’s taking aim at the evangelist Aimee Semple MacPherson (“She can go on like that for hours. Can, hell—does”), praising Hemingway’s latest collection (“He discards detail with magnificent lavishness”), or dissenting from the Tao of Pooh (“And it is that word ‘hummy,’ my darlings, that marks the first place in The House at Pooh Corner at which Tonstant Weader Fwowed up”).

Introduced by Sloane Crosley, a writer whose own rapier wit would surely have delighted Parker herself, 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.

“Does anyone know how hard it is to be that funny? . . . Read her book reviews. Read them now and see how good they are.” 

—Fran Lebowitz

“In Parker’s hands, the humble book review becomes an instrument as expressive as a lyric poem.”

—Nicholas Frankel, Wall Street Journal, Five Best Books by Great Wits

“All I wanted in this world was to come to New York and be Dorothy Parker. The funny lady. The only lady at the table. The woman who made her living by her wit . . . Who always got off the perfect line at the perfect moment, who never went home and lay awake wondering what she ought to have said because she had said exactly what she ought to have.” 

—Nora Ephron, Esquire

“The Constant Reader columns are not really book reviews; they are standup-comedy routines. You don’t have to listen to her opinion, she says. If she didn’t like the book, maybe that’s just her hangover speaking.”

—Joan Acocella, New Yorker

“Can anyone ever get too much of Dorothy Parker? . . . Here is the happy news that McNally Editions is republishing her book column “Constant Reader,” from The New Yorker, a gig that lasted only a year but whose critiques read as fresh and as wonderful as when they first appeared, in the late 1920s . . . Sloane Crosley provides a witty and perceptive foreword.”

—Jim Kelly, Air Mail, Editor’s Picks

“What gives her writing its peculiar tang is her gift for seeing something to laugh at in the bitterest tragedies of the human animal.” 

—Somerset Maugham

“A bestselling poet who moved on to fiction, Dorothy Parker . . . was equally innovative as a critic, pioneering a first‑person style and busting the taboo on hatchet jobs by women . . . She was arguably the first female celebrity wit since the 17th century, outperforming her illustrious male peers.”

—John Dugdale, The Guardian

“It is through Parker’s refusal to claim authority, then, that her book reviews achieve it. She presents readers with an unpretentious, sometimes self-mocking voice that, while it expresses strong opinions, pretends no Olympian knowledge or status. Her use of humor is even-handed: she uses it to make fun of shallow, silly, or just plain bad published work, but she also turns it on herself . . . And, as a bonus, the reviews contain some of her own best, most spirited writing, which is the reason, finally, that we continue to read them with such pleasure.”

—Nancy A. Walker, Studies in American Humor

“Length doesn’t increase depth, necessarily, and just because her little characterizations of a book were short doesn’t mean they weren’t true.”

—Gloria Steinem

Dorothy Parker née Rothschild (1898–1967), grew up on New York’s Upper West Side. She became famous for her comic poems, her short stories, her reviews, and her repartée, as recorded by the columnist Wolcott Gibbs over lunches at the Algonquin hotel. A prolific magazine contributor in her youth and a successful screenwriter (she co-wrote the original A Star is Born), she struggled all her life with alcoholism and wrote very little in her later decades, though continued to be a vocal champion of progressive causes, especially civil rights.

Sloane Crosley is the author of the essay collections I Was Told There’d Be Cake (a 2009 finalist for The Thurber Prize for American Humor), How Did You Get This Number, and Look Alive Out There (a 2019 Thurber Prize finalist); the novels The Clasp and Cult Classic; and, most recently, her memoir, Grief Is for People. A contributing editor at Vanity Fair, she lives in New York City.

Constant Reader: The New Yorker Columns 1927–28 • Paperback ISBN: 9781961341258

Nov 5, 2024 • McNALLY EDITIONS no. 34

5" x 8.5" • 224 pages • $18.00

eBook ISBN: 9781961341265