Complete Stories Read Online Free PDF Page A

Is This? New York: Villard Books, 1988.

ANTHOLOGY
     
    The Viking Portable Library: Dorothy Parker . New York: Viking, 1944. Republished as The Indispensable Dorothy Parker . New York: Book Society, 1944. Published again as Selected Short Stories . New York: Editions for the Armed Services, 1944. Revised and enlarged as The Portable Dorothy Parker . New York: Viking, 1973; revised, 1976. Republished as The Collected Dorothy Parker . London: Duck-worth, 1973.

CHRONOLOGY
     

     

     

     

A NOTE ON THE TEXT
     
    The stories are republished here from the texts of their original sources except in those instances where Dorothy Parker herself emended them in subsequent collections. The original sources are noted at the end of each story; variants and emendations are noted below. Minor orthographic emendations have been silently incorporated throughout the collection.
     
    “The Wonderful Old Gentleman” (1926) was originally subtitled “A Story Proving that No One Can Hate Like a Close Relative.” The subtitle was dropped when the story was first collected in Laments for the Living (1930) and subsequently in The Viking Portable Library: Dorothy Parker (1944).
    “Lucky Little Curtis” (1927) was retitled simply “Little Curtis” in Laments for the Living and thereafter in the Portable .
    “Long Distance” (1928), subtitled “Wasting Words, or an Attempt at a Telephone Conversation Between New York and Detroit,” was retitled “New York to Detroit” in Laments for Living and in the Portable .
    “The Waltz” (1933): The $50 figure at the end of the story was retained in Parker’s collection After Such Pleasures (1933) but changed to $20 in Parker’s Here Lies (1939) and the Portable .
    “The Custard Heart” first appeared in Here Lies (1939). Unlike her other stories, there was no original magazine publication.
    “The Game” (1948) was co-authored by Ross Evans, Parker’s collaborator on the play The Coast of Illyria (1949).

STORIES
     

Such a Pretty Little Picture
     
    Mr. Wheelock was clipping the hedge. He did not dislike doing it. If it had not been for the faintly sickish odor of the privet bloom, he would definitely have enjoyed it. The new shears were so sharp and bright, there was such a gratifying sense of something done as the young green stems snapped off and the expanse of tidy, square hedge-top lengthened. There was a lot of work to be done on it. It should have been attended to a week ago, but this was the first day that Mr. Wheelock had been able to get back from the city before dinnertime.
    Clipping the hedge was one of the few domestic duties that Mr. Wheelock could be trusted with. He was notoriously poor at doing anything around the house. All the suburb knew about it. It was the source of all Mrs. Wheelock’s jokes. Her most popular anecdote was of how, the past winter, he had gone out and hired a man to take care of the furnace, after a seven-years’ losing struggle with it. She had an admirable memory, and often as she had related the story, she never dropped a word of it. Even now, in the late summer, she could hardly tell it for laughing.
    When they were first married, Mr. Wheelock had lent himself to the fun. He had even posed as being more inefficient than he really was, to make the joke better. But he had tired of his helplessness, as a topic of conversation. All the men of Mrs. Wheelock’s acquaintance, her cousins, her brother-in-law, the boys she went to high school with, the neighbors’ husbands, were adepts at putting up a shelf, at repairing a lock, or making a shirtwaist box. Mr. Wheelock had begun to feel that there was something rather effeminate about his lack of interest in such things.
    He had wanted to answer his wife, lately, when she enlivened some neighbor’s dinner table with tales of his inadequacy with hammer and wrench. He had wanted to cry, “All right, suppose I’m not any good at things like that. What of it?”
    He had played with the idea, had tried