Dawn Ginsbergh's Revenge

by S.J. Perelman

His first book in the first state green plush covers.

239 pages, Hardcover

Published January 1, 1929

About the author

Sidney Joseph Perelman, almost always known as S. J. Perelman, was a Jewish-American humorist, author, and screenwriter. He is best known for his humorous short pieces written over many years for The New Yorker. He also wrote for several other magazines, as well as books, scripts, and screenplays.

Reviews

[Ihsan · Rating 4 out of 5]

S.J. Perelman's first book has been described as "superior college humor," but its best moments conjure the Marx Brothers. There are lots of groaner puns you can imagine coming out of Chico's mouth, and the superior wordplay--the way Perelman exploits the English language to convert nouns into verbs and vice versa--was surely what caught Groucho's eye and led him to invite Perelman to write Marx Brothers films.

Another of Perelman's skills derives from his wide, prodigious reading, especially of mass market trash. He'll splice several genres together in one short piece, as if the entire world of books was a radio with rapidly changeable channels. You never know where a paragraph will end up.

The youthful anarchic energy that holds the book together is also a welcome change from many of his later and more easily available books, which minimize wordplay and show off Perelman's vocabulary in longer and more sedate pieces. I'll gladly take Dawn Ginsbergh's Revenge over any of Perelman's post-1957 books.