Product Description

Here, in his first collection since his three hilarious classics Getting Even, Without Feathers, and Side Effects, Woody Allen has managed to write a book that not only answers the most profound questions of human existence but is also the perfect size to place under any short table leg to prevent wobbling.

In hysterical flights of inspirational sanity we are introduced to a cast of characters only Allen could imagine: Jasper Nutmeat, Flanders Mealworm, and the independent film mogul E. Coli Biggs, just to name a few. Whether he is writing about art, sex, food, or crime, he is explosively funny. In “This Nib for Hire,” a Hollywood bigwig comes across an author’s book in a little country store and describes it in a way that aptly captures this magnificent volume: “Actually,” the producer says, “I’d never seen a book remaindered in the kindling section before.”

Praise for Mere Anarchy:

INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER

“The stories in Mere Anarchy deliver the same joys and foibles that have been with its author from the start.”
–Janet Maslin, The New York Times

“Uproarious . . . In each story the ornate and the vulgate slam together and make it rain polysyllabic absurdity.”
–The Wall Street Journal

“Nostalgically enjoyable . . . The stories in Mere Anarchy deliver the same joys and foibles that have been with its author from the start.”
–The New York Times

“Brilliant neurotica . . . unfailingly entertaining . . . [an] obsessive and seriously funny book.”
–Los Angeles Times Book Review

“Like the Carnegie’s one-pound sandwiches, Allen’s literary slapstick is . . . comedy on wry.”
–USA Today

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #108554 in Books
• Published on: 2008-10-14
• Released on: 2008-10-14
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 176 pages

From Publishers Weekly
This collection of 18 sketches, 10 of which appeared in the New Yorker, is Allen’s first in 25 years. The animating comedy is part S.J. Perelman and part borscht belt: Allen piles the ludicrous on top of the ridiculous and tops it with an acidic lemon squeeze, and then just keeps the jokes coming. So when the babysitter in "Nanny Dearest" describes her boss—"Bidnick gorges himself on Viagra, but the dosage makes him hallucinate and causes him to imagine he is Pliny the Elder"—we laugh; when, in a piece making fun of the New York Times science page, "Strung Out," Allen notes that "to a man standing on the shore, time passes quicker than to a man on a boat—especially if the man on the boat is with his wife"—we groan. Sometimes the simplest pieces work best: man goes to New Age retreat and learns to levitate, but not to get back down. While this collection doesn’t quite measure up to Allen’s Without Feathers (1975), there are pieces here—for instance, the report on Mickey Mouse’s testimony at the Michael Eisner/Michael Ovitz trial—that will put a rictus on your kisser.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist
It's been 25 years since Woody Allen's last humor collection, and for lovers of the New Yorker "casual" (a blend of goofy personal essay and literary parody), that's far too long. Most of these pieces appeared originally in the New Yorker , but there are a handful of originals as well, all of which will please those determined souls who like their humor distinctly old school ("On a Bad Day You Can See Forever," a rant about the horrors of rehabbing a condo, begins with the narrator reading Dante and wondering why there is no circle in hell for contractors). The topsy-turvy literary allusions pour from Allen's pen like bullets from a Gatling gun (an appropriately obscure simile), exposing the intellectual pretensions of a ragtag assortment of Allenesque everymen--endearingly unkempt nebbishes who, despite knowing their Dostoevsky, can't quite deal with the absurdities of daily life. Take Flanders Mealworm, the unfairly unheralded author of The Hockfleisch Chronicles, who, desperate for cash, agrees to write a novelization of a Three Stooges movie: "Calmly and for no apparent reason, the dark-haired man took the nose of the bald man in his right hand and slowly twisted it in a long, counterclockwise circle." If Larry, Moe, and Curly Joe weren't exactly what Yeats had in mind when he used the phrase "mere anarchy" in "The Second Coming," they should have been. Bill Ott
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

About the Author
Woody Allen’s prolific career as a comic, writer, and filmmaker has now spanned more than five decades. He writes frequently for The New Yorker and is the author of Without Feathers, Getting Even, and Side Effects, among other books.


From the Hardcover edition.