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S. J. Perelman: Cloudland Revisited: A Misspent Youth in Books and Film (paperback)

Introduction by Adam Gopnik More

The complete series in one volume for the first time: All 22 essays by one of America’s great humorists as he revisits the books and movies from his youth—often with some embarrassment.

Overview
Table of Contents

Overview

Story of the Week “Insert Flap ‘A’ and Throw Away,” S. J. Perelman
February 2, 2024

Over a five-year period in the late 1940s and early 1950s, regular readers of The New Yorker were treated to humorist S. J. Perelman’s “Cloudland Revisited” series, witty and withering reviews of the pulp fiction and silent films that had enthralled the comic genius in his youth. Among the once-innocent-now-guilty pleasures featured were George Barr McCutcheon’s 1901 historical fantasy novel Graustark—the Game of Thrones of its era; Gertrude Atherton’s sensationalist fantasy Black Oxen; Sax Rohmer’s blockbuster supervillain novel The Mystery of Dr. Fu-Manchu; and the “underwater” silent film adaptation of Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea. Largely forgotten when the series originally appeared, and unknown to many today, these and other works enjoy a hilarious second life in Perelman’s unjustly neglected masterpiece.

All twenty-two of Perelman’s backward glances are brought together for the first time in this deluxe paperback edition. In his introduction, Adam Gopnik, another beloved New Yorker writer, reflects on the pleasures of the “Cloudland” series and how it anticipates our own pop-culture obsessions. The series “set the pattern for the American pop-art memoir,” Gopnik writes, “where a literary life is revealed through its engagement not with the high culture of its time but in a kind of meta-tussle with its mass-market overcharge, in a tone by turns affectionate, exasperated, nostalgic, and ironic.”

Sidney Joseph Perelman (1904–1979) was a longtime contributor to The New Yorker, in which he first published many of his humorous essays and sketches. He also wrote film scripts for the Marx Brothers and shared an Oscar in 1956 with James Poe and James Farrow for the screenplay of Around the World in Eighty Days.

Adam Gopnik is a staff writer for The New Yorker; he has written for the magazine since 1986. He has three National Magazine awards, for essays and for criticism, and also a George Polk Award for Magazine Reporting. The author of numerous best-selling books, including Paris to the Moon, he lives in New York City.

The paperback edition features French flaps and has been printed on acid-free paper.
Table of Contents

Introduction by Adam Gopnik
Into Your Tent I’ll Creep
Tuberoses and Tigers
How Ruritanian Can You Get?
Sodom in the Suburbs
Lady, Play Your Endocrines
Great Aches from Little Boudoirs Grow
Antic Hey-Hey
Why, Doctor, What Big Green Eyes You Have!
Rock-a-Bye, Viscount, in the Treetop
Four-and-Twenty Blackjacks
Oh, Sing Again That Song of Venery
When to the Sessions of Sweet Silent Films . . .
Roll on, Thou Deep and Dark Scenario, Roll
Vintage Swine
The Wickedest Woman in Larchmont
I’m Sorry I Made Me Cry
By the Waters of Razz-Ma-Tazz
“M” Is for the Migraine That She Gave Me
Mayfair Mama, Turn Your Damper Down
Hungarian Goulash, with Battered Noodles
It Takes Two to Tango, but Only One to Squirm
Shades of Young Girls among the Flummery

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ISBN: 978-1-59853-780-2 221 pages

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