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...parody of the once-famed gibberish of Gertrude Stein, and is the work of an unknown writer, Arthur Flegenheimer. It is one of the more recondite items in this anthology of Dwight Macdonald, critic, polemicist and New Yorker staff writer. To see just how recondite it is, the reader must not miss the footnote, in which it is disclosed that the obscure Flegenheimer is Mobster Dutch Schultz, and that the Stein "parody" is a police stenographer's transcript of his dying delirium. Such thimbleriggery is a fair sample of the tactics used by Macdonald to create, rather than compile...
...Antiquarian Thrill. Many a parody ends as a work of art in its own right, its original forgotten; the brilliant parasite fly emerges from the husk of its host. As "an antiquarian thrill," Macdonald offers the reader the original pious rhymes upon which Lewis Carroll based his verses in Alice in Wonderland. Demonstrating some sparkling footnotework, Macdonald has ranged the whole wide field of self-declared parody. He starts with Chaucer (only students of Mid. Eng. Lit. will get much of this one) and winds up with the latest chic spoof of Truman Capote based on a New York Times...
...Faulkner, in a rare item, parodying himself) have worked in this deceptive motley. Why the passion for parody among writers? Macdonald finds parody inherent in a mature culture; it is a way of digesting the past. Parody obviously demands that the original parodied should be well known to the reader, and this calls for a firmly held common culture. It persists today among the British as a form of "upper-class folk art," but its great age was the late Victorian period (C. S. Calverley, Lear and J. K. Stephen), based on a common Oxbridge education. In this century Macdonald...
People who like to read themselves to sleep with a short story or two had better stay away from this collection. Author Elliott does not write to soothe. His intention is to disturb, and if residual disturbance in the reader's mind is the mark of a good storyteller, then he must be one of the best now at work in English...
...Author Lobsenz, 28, knows something of the parched, granitic harshness of the Spanish earth and the grave pride and passion of the Spaniard, and he conveys these with authority. Unfortunately, he lacks all control over his plot, and he makes most of his points by bending a reader's ear till it aches. After a flurry of melodrama, Vangel ends up with a whole new set of values. Here they are: "I would like to repeal suffrage for women. I would like to end all war. I would like to pull down all prejudices and ignorance and persuade...