Without a Stitch in Time: A Selection of the Best Humorous Short Pieces 9780226171234
Harking from the golden age of fiction set in American suburbia—the school of John Updike and Cheever—this work from the
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English Pages 336 [372] Year 2014
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PRAISE FOR DE VRIES, WITHOUT A STITCH IN TIME “Few writers have understood literary comedy as well as De Vries . . . and few comic novelists have had his grasp of tragedy.” Jeffrey Frank “At his best, De Vries can write as others breathe . . . ” Los Angeles Times “Laughter of the mind and laughter of the heart . . . Without a Stitch in Time gets it all together!” New York Times “Marvelous . . . a major comic writer who tells us more about ourselves than we may be comfortable knowing, but we’d be a great deal poorer without him.” St. Louis Post-Dispatch “ . . . De Vries is in the high tradition of American humor, gamy, sharp-eyed, derisive, and at the same time with a kind of lyrical wink at command.” Alan Pryce-Jones, New York Herald Tribune
BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE Peter De Vries (1910–1993) was born and raised in Chicago. He studied at Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and at Northwestern, supporting himself with a variety of jobs that ranged from toffee-apple salesman to editor for Poetry magazine. During World War II, he served as a captain in the US Marines and returned home in 1944 to begin writing for the New Yorker. He then began using his incredible wit to create works outside of the magazine, writing twenty-three novels and a play, as well as novellas, essays, short stories, and poetry. His most notable works include The Tunnel of Love (1954), The Blood of the Lamb (1961), Let Me Count the Ways (1965), Reuben, Reuben (1964), and Witch’s Milk (1968); some of these have been adapted into films and Broadway plays. Still infamous for his quips and puns, De Vries has been praised as the “funniest serious writer to be found on either side of the Atlantic.”
WITHOUT A STITCH IN TIME
BOOKS BY PETER DE VRIES No But I Saw the Movie The Tunnel of Love Comfort Me witb Apples The Mackerel Plaza The Tents of Wickedness Through the Fields of Clover The Blood of the Lamb Reuben, Reuben Let Me Count the Ways The Vale of Laughter The Cat's Pajamas