Slouching Towards Kalamazoo - Softcover

De Vries, Peter

3.74

525 ratings by Goodreads

9780140070705: Slouching Towards Kalamazoo

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0140070702 ISBN 13: 9780140070705

Publisher: Penguin, 1984

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Fifteen-year-old Anthony Thrasher follows his free-spirited tutor, Miss Maggie Doubloon, and their illegitimate son, Ahab, to Kalamazoo where he meets Bubbles Breedlove, Ahab's virginal nursemaid, and falls in love with her

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Review:

"Anyone who has never read him could perhaps find no better place to start than with ["Slouching towards Kalamazoo"]. . . . It is vintage De Vries."--Thomas Meehan "New York Times "

"The fine cutting edge of his comic vision comes, as always, from the sense that there is hell to pay."--Paul Gray "Time "

"De Vries was an editor at "Poetry" magazine, a staff writer at "The New Yorker," and the author of some two dozen of the wittiest novels you'll ever read, including the masterworks "The Blood of the Lamb" and "Slouching Toward Kalamazoo," as well as "The Tunnel of Love" and "Reuben, Reuben," just resurrected in handsome paperback by the University of Chicago Press. . . . Only those with a consummate lack of cleverness wield the word 'clever' as an insult, and De Vries demonstrates just how much can be done with a creative intelligence charged by the clever and satirical and ironic. Let us now praise those saints at the University of Chicago Press who possess the smarts and good taste to return to print a peerless American maestro of wit."--William Giraldi "The Millions "

"With luck, a writer capable of producing both "Slouching Towards Kalamazoo" and "The Blood of the Lamb" will not remain unappreciated for long."
--Adam Kirsch "New York Sun ""

"Anyone who has never readhim could perhaps find no better place to start than with ["Slouching towards Kalamazoo"]. . . . It is vintage De Vries."--Thomas Meehan "New York Times ""

De Vries was an editor at "Poetry" magazine, a staff writer at "The New Yorker," and the author of some two dozen of the wittiest novels you ll ever read, including the masterworks "The Blood of the Lamb" and "Slouching Toward Kalamazoo," as well as "The Tunnel of Love" and "Reuben, Reuben," just resurrected in handsome paperback by the University of Chicago Press. . . . Only those with a consummate lack of cleverness wield the word clever as an insult, and De Vries demonstrates just how much can be done with a creative intelligence charged by the clever and satirical and ironic. Let us now praise those saints at the University of Chicago Press who possess the smarts and good taste to return to print a peerless American maestro of wit. --William Giraldi "The Millions ""

About the Author:

Peter De Vries (1910–1993), the man responsible for contributing to the cultural vernacular such witticisms as "Nostalgia ain't what it used to be" and "Deep down, he's shallow," was, according to Kingsley Amis, "the funniest serious writer to be found on either side of the Atlantic." But De Vries's life and work was informed as much by sorrow as by wit, and that dynamic is nowhere better seen than in his classics Slouching Towards Kalamazoo and The Blood of the Lamb. First published in 1982 and 1965, respectively, these novels reemerge with their sharp satire and biting pain undiluted by time.

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