Reviews - The Portable Dorothy Parker

The Portable Dorothy Parker by Dorothy Parker

127 reviews for:

I was underwhelmed. "Big Blonde" was great, but many of the stories felt formulaic, cranked out and dated. The essays, reviews and letters were better, but even there, after awhile they became repetitious.

wutheringreader's review against another edition

3.0

i read all of the poetry collections in this and i really enjoyed them. i read most of the short stories, but the rest i really couldn't get through because they were just bleh. i liked "arrangement in black and white," though! i also read all of the book reviews/letters/etc. it was only the short stories that i didn't complete fully.

literallyshook's review

5.0

challenging dark emotional funny lighthearted reflective sad fast-paced

ribbonreuben's review

4.0

I loved reading the various works of Dorothy Parker! Many of the letters, poems, and short stories are still extremely relevant decades later, and I'm glad I've read them.

mishamir's review

4.25

dark emotional funny informative lighthearted reflective sad fast-paced

charlottebea's review against another edition

5.0

I’ve always admired Dorothy Parker. This collection of her writing is one I come back to in different moods and at different times. Her short stories are a mixed bag. The characters are vivid, written by a woman who spent her life observing people and bitingly remarking on what she saw. Most of them are bittersweet, and languid in some parts. Big Blonde is the one that stayed with me the most, the rest sort of blended together. Still, they’re well written.
The darker side of her life is reflected in her poetry. Her father abuse, her self-medication, her failed suicide and failed marriages. Her poetry echoes with that misery, and is mostly about death and abandonment, with lots of metaphor. I though it was beautiful, and love her poems ‘Condolence’ ‘A Certain Lady’ and ‘Tombstones in the Starlight’. Her reviews, I think, are where I can see the queen of the Algonquin round table reign. I wish I was alive when she was, so I could get the culture references a little better, but they still manage to make me laugh. I would love to hear her thoughts on the 2000s. 5/5. She is a beautiful writer with a sharp tongue and a deep thoughts behind that.

jwilding's review against another edition

3.0

Dorothy, you sound much more interesting than your writing.

headingnorth's review against another edition

4.0

I only read this for the short stories, so I skipped everything else except a few of the book reviews. Most of the stories were quite good, though a remarkable number of them were about women acting very pathetically about men who were clearly just stringing them along. Parker doesn’t seem to have thought very highly of women.