Rating: Summary: THURBER!!!! Review: The works and cartoons of James Thurber have had quite an influence on me over the years. At a very young age I was drawn to his cartoons (pardon the pun), and as I grew older developed a great appreciation of his writings. Decades after their inception, his works ring true.
Rating: Summary: THURBER!!!! Review: The works and cartoons of James Thurber have had quite an influence on me over the years. At a very young age I was drawn to his cartoons (pardon the pun), and as I grew older developed a great appreciation of his writings. Decades after their inception, his works ring true.
Rating: Summary: Thurber's humour belongs in a category of its own Review: This compendium will give a thoroughly entertaining taste of one of the twentieth century's greatest humourists. Thurber's imagination and wit have an appeal all their own.This anthology brings together a number of his short stories as well as selections from amongst his modern fables and cartoons. 'What Do You Mean, It Was Brillig?' and 'The Night the Bed Fell' are two excellent and hilarious tales that serve well as an introduction to Thurber's surreal world. Don't read these in public unless you are prepared to draw attention to yourself - they will have you laughing out loud. In his fables, modelled after Aesop, but with a twentieth-century bent, Thurber delights in catching the reader unaware with his own particular brand of irony. The cartoons are ingenious. Sometimes you will read a cartoon in a newspaper and it will make you laugh. Go back to it again and it no longer has the same effect. Thurber's cartoons, on the other hand, are so utterly inspired (I do not exaggerate), that they will improve upon a second and third look. You will discover subtle nuances you didn't perceive before. His funniest offerings draw on the theme of marriage, and frequently involve the chasm between a husband and wife trapped in a marriage out of which the love and romance has long since disappeared. You will be left baffled as to where exactly Thurber came across such a natural talent for finding (and exploiting) the absurd in everything.
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