Acres and Pains

by S.J. Perelman

Book Overview

If you can spare the time to drive sixty miles into the backwoods of eastern Pennsylvania, crouch down in a bed of poison ivy, and peer through the sumacs, you will be rewarded by an interesting sight. What you will see is a middle-aged city dweller, as lean and bronzed as a shad's belly (I keep a shad's belly hanging up in the barn for purposes of comparison), gnawing his fingernails and wondering how to abandon a farm.

Thus begins...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1580800165
• ISBN13: 9781580800167
• Release Date: November 1998
• Publisher: Burford Books
• Length: 128 Pages
• Weight: 0.40 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.4" x 6.2" x 8.2"

Customer Reviews

My Favorite Perelman

I have read a fair amount of Perelman and although I enjoy him I find his humor a bit dated at times, while at other times he is trying to be too clever, playing word games that interfere with the overall flow of the writing. I have no such reservations about this book, whose humor is timeless, and outstanding. Anyone who has ever felt they've been done in by a contractor, or anyone who has ever tried the country life for a while will especially enjoy the book. One of the stories, about staying alone in the country house at night, caused me to break out in tears of laughter the first three times I read it.

Buy this book - it's worth its weight in gold.

As S.J. Perelman himself put it: "Before they made me, they broke the mold." One-of-a-kind, lapidary, laugh-outloud prose. Buy this book and become addicted, like the rest of us.

Perelman Is Truly a Humor Writer's Writer

I scribble the occasional humor book myself (most recently, Scratching The 'Net: Web Sites for Cats) but I can only dream of one day reaching the classy comedic heights of Mr. Perelman. He had an amazing command of language, yet wrote in a style so amazingly easy to read that it goes down like a fine wine. Acres and Pains is a decent sample of his work, telling tales of his travails in Bucks County, PA, where so many of the New York literati used to maintain country homes. His run-ins with the locals, relatives and the house itself (which he named "Rising Gorge") provide one hilarious situation after another. When it comes to 20th century humor writers, Perelman is a refined cut above.

Great author, funny, eloquent, sophisticated material

Why do so few people know SJ Perelman's work today? Is it because of the strange way his last name is spelled and thereby eluding the casual library/bookstore searcher typing in something like: "Pearlman"? Or perhaps he has simply become overshadowed by his more famous and equally witty contemporaries, Robert Benchley and Groucho Marx. (Perelman did indeed help write a few Marx Bros. movies - and he writes hilariously about those experiences). Check out Mr. Perelman's work. Sadly, this short book is just about the only collection of his material available on the market, and that's a great pity. It's not really his finest work... but at the least, it's a start. One must let S.J. take them out for a whirl.