A masterpiece of literate lunacy, lascivousness, and love. Earl Peckham's highbrow novel has sold only three copies, and he had failed with the ladies. D riven by frustration, he sets out across America to find his three readers. When, in Omaha, he meets Poppy, the author of his publisher's bestselling "trash" novel, an affair of sublime incongruity ensues. DeVries is a veteran New Yorker editor.

Peckham's Marbles

DE VRIES, Peter

Literature & Fiction

McGraw-Hill Book Co.

The impending death of his young daughter forces a man to confront the God he has rejected since youth

The Blood of the Lamb

Viking Pr

Reverend Andrew Mackerel, a recent widower falls in love with Molly Calico, a clerk at City Hall, but must keep it a secret because of the plaza and shopping mall being planned to honor the late Mrs. Mackerel

The Mackerel Plaza (Twentieth-century classics)

Oxford University Press

The most poignant of all De Vries's novels, The Blood of the Lamb is also the most autobiographical. It follows the life of Don Wanderhop from his childhood in an immigrant Calvinist family living in Chicago in the 1950s through the loss of a brother, his faith, his wife, and finally his daughter-a tragedy drawn directly from De Vries's own life. Despite its foundation in misfortune, The Blood of the Lamb offers glimpses of the comic sensibility for which De Vries was famous. Engaging directly with the reader in a manner that buttresses the personal intimacy of the story, De Vries writes with a powerful blend of grief, love, wit, and fury.

The Blood of the Lamb: A Novel

Humor & Entertainment

Humor

University of Chicago Press

It is 1963 in an unnamed town in North Dakota, and Anthony Thrasher is languishing for a second year in eighth grade. Prematurely sophisticated, young Anthony spends too much time reading Joyce, Eliot, and Dylan Thomas but not enough time studying the War of 1812 or obtuse triangles. A tutor is hired, and this "modern Hester Prynne" offers Anthony lessons that ultimately free him from eighth grade and situate her on the cusp of the American sexual revolution. Anthony's restless adolescent voice is perfectly suited to De Vries's blend of erudite wit and silliness—not to mention his fascination with both language and female anatomy—and it propels Slouching Towards Kalamazoo through theological debates and quandaries both dermatological and ethical, while soaring on the De Vriesian hallmark of scrambling conventional wisdom for comic effect.

Slouching Towards Kalamazoo (Phoenix Fiction)

Humor & Satire

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. A manic epic, Reuben, Reuben is really three books in one, tied together by a 1950s suburban Connecticut setting and hyper-literate cast of characters. A corruptible chicken farmer fearful for the fate of his beloved town, a womanizing poet from Wales (Dylan Thomas in disguise), and a hapless British poet-cum-actor-and-agent all take turns as narrator, revealing different, even conflicting views. But alcoholism, sexism, small-mindedness, and calamity challenge the high spirits of De Vries’s well-read suburbanites. 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.

Reuben, Reuben: A Novel

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.

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

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. De Vries’s classic situation comedy The Tunnel of Love follows the interactions of a socially insecure, pun-loving family man, an officious lady caseworker from an adoption agency, and a chauvinist pig—all suburban neighbors who know far too much about one another’s private lives in this goofy and gently hilarious tale of marital quibbles. 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 Tunnel of Love: A Novel

Underachiever Anthony Thrasher gets his eighth-grade teacher, Miss Doubloon, pregnant only to fall for luscious nursemaid Bubbles Breedlove, in a ribald tale of the sexual revolution

Slouching Towards Kalamazoo

Literary

Little,Brown

The impending death of his young daughter forces a man to confront the God he has rejected since youth

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by DE VRIES, Peter. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by DE VRIES, Peter

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by DE VRIES, Peter. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Peckham's Marbles

The Blood of the Lamb

The Mackerel Plaza (Twentieth-century classics)

The Blood of the Lamb: A Novel

Slouching Towards Kalamazoo (Phoenix Fiction)

Reuben, Reuben: A Novel

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

The Tunnel of Love: A Novel

Slouching Towards Kalamazoo

The Blood of the Lamb