![]() ![]() Fortunately the book was only 135 pages long or it may have made it to my fairly short list of books I failed to finish.Īm I missing something? Maybe a confirmed Thurberite could comment and explain why his writing should be compared to the Grand Canyon. The tales are tedious in the extreme, I even tried reading them aloud in case they sounded better that way they didn’t. It felt very like reading old copies of Punch magazine where you find yourself wondering how anyone ever found any of this remotely funny. All I can say is that in the intervening eighty seven years since the book was first published and seventy two years since that glowing introduction the humour has apparently evaporated. With a build up like that how could I resist? Well I wish I had. This volume – the first of his to appear in Penguins – contains some of his maddest stories, such as The Night the Bed Fell and The Day the Dam Broke, which will be the best of introductions to non-Thurber readers and a renewed delight to confirmed Thurberites. ![]() Yet both are undeniably acts of nature, which delight as well as amaze. James Thurber is America’s greatest genius of humour and is as much a phenomenon as the Grand Canyon indeed, they might both be said to have a nightmare and fantastic unreality about them. ![]() Originally published in 1933, this is the first Penguin Books edition from July 1948 and the introduction printed inside the front cover made me want to read it. ![]()
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