Dorothy Parker

Dorothy Parker, more than any of her contemporaries, captured the spirit of her age in her writing. The decadent 1920s and 1930s in New York were a time of great experiment and daring for women. For the rich, life seemed a continual party, but the excesses took their emotional toll. With a biting wit and perceptive insight, Dorothy Parker examines...

Introducing Little Clothbound Classics – irresistible, mini editions of short stories, novellas and essays from the world's greatest writers, designed by the award-winning Coralie Bickford-Smith. Dorothy Parker was the most talked-about woman of the decadent 1920s, notorious as a hard-drinking bad girl with a talent for endlessly quotable one-liners. In the stories collected here, she brilliantly captures the spirit of...

90 classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin Books What can you say, when a man asks you to dance with him? I most certainly will not dance with you. I'll see you in hell first. Why, thank you, I'd like to awfully, but I'm having labour pains. Acerbic, pithy and vibrant, Dorothy Parker's writings capture the dizzying decadence of...

Fifty new books at £1 each, celebrating the pioneering spirit of the Penguin Modern Classics series, from inspiring essays to groundbreaking fiction and poetry. She felt a cozy solidarity with the big company of the voluntary dead. Wise-cracking and heartbreaking, these tales of women on the edge by the legendary wit Dorothy Parker show the darkness beneath the surface of...

Dorothy Parker's complete weekly New Yorker column about books and people and the rigours 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...

In Just a Little One, Dorothy Parker distils a lifetime of wit, despair, and defiance into a single, unsteady cocktail-hour monologue. A woman, armed with charm and self-deprecation, insists she's "not really drinking", as her voice wavers between irony and heartbreak. Beneath the sparkling surface of repartee, Parker exposes the loneliness of modern urban life and the tragicomedy of self-awareness....