(During the early years of her career, while struggling to "keep body and soul apart" (as she ruefully put it later), Dorothy Parker wrote more than three hundred poems and verses for a variety of popular magazines and newspapers. Between 1926 and 1933 she collected most of these pieces in three volumes of poetry: Enough Rope, Sunset Gun, and Death and Taxes. The remaining poems and verses from America's most renowned cynic make up this volume. Eclectic and exuberant, these 122 once-forgotten gems display Parker's distinctive wit, irony, and precision, as she dissects early-twentieth-century American urban life and gleefully skewers a rich array of targets that range from personal foible to popular culture. With an authoritative, immensely entertaining, and critically acclaimed introduction by Stuart Y. Silverstein, Not Much Fun is an essential addition to the Dorothy Parker library and a welcome gift to her many admirers and devoted fans.

A succinct, yet enlightening introduction and footnotes with quintessential Dorothy Parker anecdotes and quotes serve as brilliant foundation for this collection of "lost" poems. In fact, they are pieces that Parker discarded as not fit for publication, and Parker enthusiasts will notice that many foreshadow more-polished later versions. Though Parker once described her verse as "horribly outdated--anything once fashionable is dreadful now," it's clear that even her "unfit" works are far from dreadful.

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