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The Inimitable Jeeves (Jeeves). P.G. Wodehouse. 1923. 225 pages.
The Inimitable Jeeves is my favorite Wodehouse yet. (I've also read
The Man With Two Left Feet and
My Man Jeeves.) I loved this short story collection because it is
all devoted to Bertie and Jeeves! Featured stories include: "Jeeves Exerts the Old Cerebellum," "No Wedding Bells for Bingo," "Aunt Agatha Speaks Her Mind," "Pearls Mean Tears," "The Pride of the Woosters is Wounded," "The Hero's Reward," "Introducing Claude and Eustace," "Sir Roderick Comes to Lunch," "A Letter of Introduction," Startling Dressiness of a Lift Attendant," Comrade Bingo," "Bingo Has a Bad Goodwood," "The Great Sermon Handicap," "The Purity of the Turf," "The Metropolitan Touch," "The Delayed Exit of Claude and Eustace," "Bingo and the Little Woman," and "All's Well."
These stories introduce one of Bertie's friends, Bingo Little. He is quite the character. He is always falling in love with someone. And there's always drama that Bertie and Jeeves get drawn into! But Bingo Little isn't the only source of drama! There's also Bertie's family, including Aunt Agatha and two of his cousins, Claude and Eustace, to name a few. Some of the stories are set in the city, others take place in the country. All are delightful!!!
My favorite sequence of stories is "The Hero's Reward," "Introducing Claude and Eustace," and "Sir Roderick Comes to Lunch." In this sequence, Bertie finds himself accidentally engaged to a girl, Honoria, a young woman that Bingo was once quite smitten with! Sir Roderick is Honoria's father, and their lunch together is quite delightful! He's not quite sure he likes Bertie, not quite sure Bertie is sane... enter an insane number of cats, fish under Bertie's bed, and a stolen hat... and you've got an unforgettable chapter!
Read The Inimitable Jeeves
- If you like short stories
- If you love short stories
- If you hate short stories
- If you enjoy P.G. Wodehouse
- If you want more Bertie and Jeeves
- If you love to laugh
© 2013 Becky Laney of
Becky's Book Reviews
The Man With Two Left Feet. P.G. Wodehouse. 1917. 200 pages.
I loved this collection of P.G. Wodehouse short stories. These thirteen short stories had originally appeared in various magazines in both the UK and US before being published in book form in 1917. The stories: "Bill The Bloodhound," "Extricating Young Gussie," Wilton's Holiday," "The Mixer: He Meets a Shy Gentleman," "The Mixer: He Moves In Society," "Crowned Heads," "At Geisenheimer's," "The Making of Mac's," "One Touch of Nature," "Black for Luck," "The Romance of an Ugly Policeman," "A Sea of Troubles," and "The Man With Two Left Feet."
Some of the stories are set in America, other stories are set in England. A few of these stories even have animal narrators: that's how diverse these stories are! (The two "Mixer" stories are narrated by a dog.) "Black for Luck" stars a traveling black cat that may or may bring luck with him.
I absolutely LOVED, LOVED, LOVED Wodehouse's writing style. "Extricating Young Gussie," introduces Bertie and Jeeves. Readers will be treated to plenty of stories starring these two in following books. "Bill the Bloodhound" was an interesting "detective" story of sorts. It starring a detective that isn't clever and brilliant, but just a likable guy who may not be good at his job but is fun to know anyway. "Wilton's Holiday" and "The Man With Two Left Feet" are short stories with a dancing theme. I really, really enjoyed both of those. In "Wilton's Holiday," readers meet a professional dancer who entertains some out of town visitors. The husband has been to New York before and is very proud of himself and confident that he knows everything there is to know. The dancer has pity on his poor wife who is sitting in the background watching her husband behave foolishly. He won't dance with her because she's never been to New York before and couldn't possibly dance well enough to be seen in public. She goes to speak with the wife and convinces her to dance with someone else, to even enter a dance competition....It is a story well worth reading! "The Man With Two Left Feet" is also a story about a newly married couple. The man who cannot dance falls in love with a beautiful woman; after a year of marriage he realizes that his wife may miss not being able to go out and go dancing. He begins to secretly take dance lessons. It does not go well. But he's persistent. The wife meanwhile wonders why her husband is acting so strange and has changed his habits... It's also a fun story, in a way, because the man is reading his way through the encyclopedia.
I enjoyed so many of these stories! I would definitely recommend this one!
Read The Man With Two Left Feet
- If you love short stories
- If you hate short stories
- If you enjoy humorous stories
- If you enjoy great writing, great storytelling
© 2013 Becky Laney of
Becky's Book Reviews
My Man Jeeves. P.G. Wodehouse. 1919. 256 pages.
My Man Jeeves (1919) was my first introduction to the wonderful writer, P.G. Wodehouse. I absolutely loved, loved, loved it from first to last. This is a short story collection containing eight short stories: four short stories starring Bertie and Jeeves ("Leave it to Jeeves," "Jeeves and the Unbidden Guest," "Jeeves and the Hard-boiled Egg," "The Aunt and the Sluggard") and four short stories starring Reggie Pepper ("Absent Treatment," "Helping Freddie," "Rallying Round Old George," and "Doing Clarence a Bit of Good.") The writing is WONDERFUL. I just loved, loved, loved its cleverness, its playfulness, its attention to detail. It's just a DELIGHT to read this one. My favorite stories were the ones starring Jeeves and Bertie. But I also enjoyed the other stories.
This is a collection I see myself rereading again and again just because it is so very fun! Read My Man Jeeves- If you love short stories
- If you hate short stories
- If you enjoy humorous stories
- If you love Bertie and Jeeves
- If you enjoy P.G. Wodehouse
- If you love great storytelling or narration
© 2013 Becky Laney of
Becky's Book Reviews
Here at Overlook, we're delighted to be adding another three volumes to our already voluminous Collector's Wodehouse series. If you're an anglophile or just a lover of good literature, these three books are sure to charm, thanks to P.G. Wodehouse's witty prose and hilariously complex plots. Wodehouse is the master of social hijinks and comedy and has the remarkable ability to bring his socialite
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Scott sent us this wonderful picture of his bookshelves--he has a full collection of Overlook's P.G. Wodehouse. Any other Wodehouse fans up there? We'd love to add pictures of your collections, too!
If you're unfamiliar with Wodehouse, learn more on our website. Two new titles--Service with a Smile and The Pothunters--will be in stores this week!
Happy Wodehouse reading!
We're big fans of the Nonsuch Book blog, and are delighted with share the joy of P.G. Wodehouse this holiday season with the Twelve Days of Wodehouse. Readers of The Winged Elephant can join the fun by entering in this spectacular contest and win one of those gorgeous volumes from Overlook's Collector's Wodehouse series. The giveaway begins today and runs until December 12, with a featured Wodehouse title every day.
Today is the birthday of the great P.G. Wodehouse! And what better way to celebrate than picking up a new volume in Overlook's beloved Collector's Wodehouse series. The latest releases are Barmy in Wonderland and The Man with Two Left Feet. And coming in April 2010 are The Indiscretions of Archie and Frozen Assets. Happy Birthday, Plum!
For the true, die-hard Wodehouse fans, today might be a good day to pick up Plum Sauce: A P.G. Wodehouse Companion, byRichard Usborne. In this marvelously entertaining guide, Usborne brings order to the vast an tangled fictional world that Wodehouse stitched together in a writing career that stretched over 70 years and nearly 100 books.
As the long weekend approaches and summer winds down, perhaps it's time for A Few Quick Ones by the great P.G. Wodehouse, the latest release in Overlook's beloved Collector's Wodehouse series. A Few Quick Ones (1959) is one of Wodehouse’s famous collections of ten stories in which many old friends reappear in deliciously absurd situations. Some of his favorite characters are here for the party—Jeeves and Wooster, Mr. Mulliner, Bingo, the tight-wad Oofy Proessor, Ukridge and, of course, the Drones are in force. The is the final appearance by Ukridge, and Ukridge, last seen, is in the soup.
Book reviewer Mary Whipple offers a critique of P.G. Wodehouse's Galahad at Blandings, just released in Overlook's beloved Collector's Wodehouse series: "In this ninth of his eleven Blandings Castle farces, P. G. Wodehouse brings a large cast of mostly repeating characters to Blandings Castle in Shropshire, where their adolescent behavior, their misplaced values, and their obliviousness to real issues in a real world, allow Wodehouse to create gentle but pointed satire of the British upperclass, of which he himself was also a member. Written in 1965, but set in 1929, this novel, like all Wodehouse writing, is timeless in its ability to capture the silly, the petty, and the laughable in complex and hilarious plots in which numerous misunderstandings occur because characters refuse to be honest with themselves and with each other. Wodehouse selects perfect, absurd details to describe these characters as they engage in perfectly outrageous actions, as he encourages readers from all walks of life to laugh with those whom “society” considers to be “upper” class. . . The action is fast and furious, with one complication following another. The humor is obvious and very visual, with silly characters behaving much the way they do in the earliest TV sitcoms or Marx Brothers movies. Wodehouse’s sense of timing and his fine grasp of his characters, many of whom repeat throughout the series, keep readers amused and feeling as if they are reading about the escapades of old friends who don’t quite “get it.” A delightful entertainment which allows Wodehouse to tweak upper-class pretensions and values, which he has seen up close in his own life, Galahad at Blandings is fun to read for the pictures it conjures of a much earlier time and place."
Dennis Drabelle, writing in the Washington Post's excellent Short Stack blog, offers a unusual theory on P.G. Wodehouse: "Overlook Press has been publishing deluxe-ish editions of the works of P.G. Wodehouse, and the latest has just arrived: Aunts Aren't Gentlemen. I mean "latest" in two senses: This is the latest volume to come out, and it was the last novel the overlord of light comedy finished before his death in 1975. (He left a later manuscript, the aptly titled Sunset at Blandings, incomplete.) This rounding out of the Wodehousean oeuvre reminds me of a theory put forward by Robert McCrums in his excellent biography, Wodehouse: A Life: He traces the sexlessness of all the romances in the master's novels to the mumps.
Having come down with the mumps myself as a teenager, I recall being warned to be as listless as possible in the bed I was supposed to get out of only to go the bathroom. The danger, I was told, was that roughhousing might end my sex life before it had even started. McCrum suggests that in Wodehouse's case that dire possibility actually came to pass, reducing his sex drive to near-zero. This means that his marriage may have been unconsummated (he begat no children) and may explain why Bertie Wooster sneaks into and out of countless manor houses with ease but can't find his way into Madeline Basset's bed. McCrum may be right, may be wrong, but what's been on my mind lately is what would happen if Wodehouse's characters did have intercourse. The American novelist Jonathan Ames tried to answer that question a couple of years ago in his novel "Wake Up, Sir!," a Wodehouse pastiche in which there is plenty of humping. It's quite enjoyable, but it's not Wodehouse, partly because nobody can measure up to the master in depicting utter silliness in an inimitably facetious prose style. And partly because, well, the Wodehouse brand has to be genitals-free. Why that is, I'm not sure, but here's a guess: It's part of the Zeitgeist. During most of Wodehouse's long career, writers and readers had yet to reach an accord by which the former would knock down the bedroom walls and the latter would peer in."
Salman Rushdie picked a few of his favorite books in yesterday's "In My Library" column for the New York Post, and included the P.G. Wodehouse classic The Code of the Woosters: "When I was growing up in India, the most beloved English-language writers were Agatha Christie and P.G. Wodehouse. I read industrial-size quantities of both. If I stretch myself, I can probably still recite, from memory, passages from The Code of the Woosters."
Time magazine notes that P.G. Wodehouse assigned a hangover cure to his most famous fictional creation, Jeeves, the estimable butler famous for his bracer of Worcestershire sauce, raw egg, and pepper. "Gentlemen have told me they find it extremely invigorating after a late evening," he explained to a red-eyed Bertie Wooster in the 1916 short story, Jeeves Takes Charge, which appears in the Carry On Jeeves volume of the Collector's Wodehouse. And the foodie website, Serious Eats, also comments on the cure: "Jeeves confronts Bertie's wretching hangover with his magic potion: raw egg, Worcestshire sauce, and red pepper. As Jeeves puts it: It is the Worcester sauce that gives it its colour. The raw egg makes it nutritious. The red pepper gives it its bite. Gentlemen have told me they have found it extremely invigorating after a late evening."
Timothy Mangan of the Orange County Register takes a long look at one of Overlook's favorite publishing projects: The Collector's Wodehouse.
"The latest installments of the complete edition of P.G. Wodehouse from Overlook Press have arrived and all is sweetness and light.
Nothing Serious (the title might serve for all of this author's writing) and
Psmith, Journalist (the p is silent) are, if my math is correct, numbers 62 and 63 in the Overlook series, which in years hence will run to more than 90 uniform volumes. And beautiful volumes they are, printed on Scottish cream-wove, acid-free paper, sewn and bound in cloth, with piquantly illustrated dust jackets. Jeeves would no doubt approve. Perhaps more importantly, Wodehouse fans will approve: the Overlook Wodehouse revives many hard-to-find gems, not otherwise available in print.
In fact, Wodehouse's books have dated little if at all. His books unfold in an aristocratic alternative universe where the only people who seem to have ever worked for a living are the butlers. It would seem to be a real world, dating to a certain place and time, but it probably never existed at all. At any rate, it is surprising how few contemporary references the books include. A book written by Wodehouse in the '20s reads much the same as one written in the '60s. Radio or television do not intrude, nor do wars or other news; transportation is provided by cars and trains, occasionally ships. There are telephones and telegrams. But the main activities are timeless – eating, drinking, smoking, conniving, and the pursuit of love. It seems familiar and remains funny, unlike much of the comedy of the past."
By: John Mark Boling,
on 9/17/2008
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On Monday, Paper Cuts, the blog of the New York Times Book Review, attempted to determine the funniest novel ever. At the top of their list were not one, but two Wodehouse classics: THE CODE OF THE WOOSTERS and LEAVE IT TO PSMITH.
Galleycat, however, disagreed:
"For example, where P.G. Wodehouse is concerned, The Code of the Woosters and Leave it to Psmith may be funny, but they are not UNCLE FRED IN THE SPRINGTIME—which is, in fact, the funniest English-language novel ever published, no matter what any of you care to say different. (Even the ones who point out that the Times left out the works of Kyril Bonfiglioli!)"
So, while there may be some debate as to the exact novel, Paper Cuts and Galleycat agree: If you want to laugh, Wodehouse is the man for the job.
What's your favorite Wodehouse novel? Post your defense below for a chance to win the next two books in our Collector's Wodehouse series: PSMITH, JOURNALIST and NOTHING SERIOUS. The answer that makes us laugh the hardest wins!
David Ulin, Book Editor of The Los Angeles Times, takes note of the newest addition to Overlook's Everyman Wodehouse, P Smith Journalist: "Journalism has always been a desperate business. That's the subtext of P.G. Wodehouse's 1915 novel Psmith, Journalist, which has just been reissued as part of a project meant to preserve all of the author's 90-something books. Wodehouse, of course, is best known for his novels about the butler Jeeves and his dandy, Bertie Wooster, parodies of English manor life. Psmith, though, was a recurring early character, an overstuffed British public school product who blunders in and out of extreme situations yet is actually much smarter than he looks. That personality is on full display here as Psmith comes to Manhattan and gets involved with a bland family newspaper called Cosy Moments, which, in collaboration with its fill-in editor Billy Windsor, he turns into a muckraking rag par excellence.Given the trend in contemporary news to go in a softer direction, it's refreshing to read about a pair of journalists who want to stir up trouble; the main action of the novel involves the conflict between Cosy Moments and a particularly nasty slumlord who calls in the gangs of New York in an effort to shut the paper down. This being farce, there is no real sense of risk, and Wodehouse delights in all sorts of narrative devices -- he especially loves a deus ex machina -- but the ride is so enjoyable we hardly care."
The latest volume in Overlook's magnificent Collector's Wodehouse series is Something Fishy, a marvelous novel set in the Elysian suburb of Valley Fields. Something Fishy follows the romantic fortunes of Lord Uffenham's niece Jane, her unspeakable fiance, and Bill Hollister, the dashing stranger who comes to her rescue. When all the characters find themselves involved in the fate of a million-dollar fortune, the stage is set for a classic chain of comic muddles and misunderstandings which naturally result in Bill getting both the girl and the cash.
In a new one-man show, John Lithgow: Stories By Heart, the award-winning actor offers a comic meditation on the art and essence of storytelling. Invoking memories of his grandmother and father before him, Lithgow traces his own history as an actor and storyteller, a history spanning three generations, culminating in a performance of the P.G. Wodehouse story Uncle Fred Flits By, in which the actor performs a 40-minute monologue, portraying nine distinct characters with zany abandon. The piece will be performed on Sunday and Monday nights beginning on April 20 in the Mitzi E. Newhouse Theatre at Lincoln Center in New York and run for 14 performances only through June 2. Opening night is set for May 12. Uncle Fred Flits By features the first appearance of Pongo Twistleton and his Uncle Fred, who would go on to feature in four novels, including two appearances at Blandings Castle. You can find Uncle Fred Flits By in the collection of stories Young Men in Spats, part of the beloved Collector's Wodehouse series published by Overlook.
Writer and critic Alexandra Mullen pays tribute to the genius of P.G. Wodehouse in a wonderful essay on the two new Overlook reissues, Sam the Sudden and Big Money: "Take heart that Overlook Press has already released about 58 handsomely produced and reasonably priced hardcover Wodehouses; only about another 50 or so to go. Now there's one of the best blessings of a reader's existence -- dive in anywhere."
I absolutely LOVE P. G. Wodehouse! He is truly hilarious.