Last chance for the Dorothy Parker book club!!

We start on Saturday at 10 am Pacific on Zoom, and there's assigned reading

Dorothy Parker at the height of her powers, in the 1920s and early ’30s. Splendidly illustrated by Kathryn Rathke

To join the club, you need:

• a ticket

• a copy of the book

There is a small reading assignment before our first session, which you will get with your receipt and confirmation.

All book club sessions happen on Zoom.

They are recorded and sent weekly after each session to the email address you use at checkout.

If you’re signing someone else up for the club as a gift, use their email, not yours, at checkout.

This is the book to get. Big thanks if you buy it using this link. Or if you have a cool, independent bookstore near you, they’ll probably have it.

As I was just saying in an email to all the members of the club, Dorothy Parker is a writer who has meant a lot to me in my creative life.

She wrote all kinds of things, not just short stories and poems but also journalism and criticism and underwear captions for Vogue.

And there are so many interesting, overlooked, funny, fascinating parts of her life story that I can’t wait to tell you.

Her lens on the 1920s is like no one else’s — but her work is not just a time capsule.

What with her politics and her satiric wit and her relationship with The New Yorker (which turns 100 next week), her life and work are more relevant now than they’ve been in a century.

You’ve been warned

Content warning: drinking, drugs, abortion, suicide, racism, hating herself and her family, other things I can’t remember. Wheee!

She was blacklisted during the McCarthy era, and her later years were a tragedy. You can see that sense of tragedy in this masterpiece of a portrait illustration by Kathryn (who’s in the club, by the way!)