Without a Stitch in Time: A Selection of the Best Humorous Short Pieces

“The range of his performance is hard to equal. . . . De Vries produces something that is more than brilliant entertainment.” —New York Times

Harking from the golden age of fiction set in American suburbia—the school of John Updike and Cheever—this work from the great American humorist Peter De Vries looks with laughter upon its lawns, its cocktails, and its slightly unreal feeling of comfort. Without a Stitch in Time, a selection of forty-six articles and stories written for the New Yorker between 1943 and 1973, offers pun-filled autobiographical vignettes that reveal the source of De Vries’s nervous wit: the cognitive dissonance between his Calvinist upbringing in 1920s Chicago and the all-too-perfect postwar world. Noted as much for his verbal fluidity and wordplay as for his ability to see humor through pain, De Vries will delight both new readers and old in this uproarious modern masterpiece. “The beauty of a pun is in the eye of the beholder. . . . For between the punch lines, De Vries shows himself as a lapsed Calvinist who sees the world as a reproach to that incurable hypocrite, man. Irony is De Vries’s weapon, and this collection of fugitive pieces extends his gallery of not always humane inconsistencies.” —Time

“Quick with quips so droll and witty, so penetrating and precise that you almost don’t feel them piercing your pretensions.” -- Sacramento Bee

“The funniest serious writer to be found on either side of the Atlantic.” —Kingsley Amis

“A peerless American maestro of wit.” —The Millions

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