The Man with Two Left Feet and Other Stories

By P.G. Wodehouse

Book Overview

With each volume edited and reset and printed on Scottish cream-wove, acid-free paper, sewn and bound in cloth, these novels are elegant additions to the legions of Wodehouse fans? libraries. This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0140016015
• ISBN13: 9780140016017
• Release Date: August 1991
• Publisher: Penguin Books
• Length: 224 Pages
• Weight: 0.60 lbs.
• Dimensions: 7.8" x 0.5" x 5.1"

Customer Reviews

“Life is not all bones and liver.”

This is my first P. G. (Pelham Grenville) Wodehouse. I did not realize that it is a collection of short stories; many of the stories have a unique perspective. I did find myself using a lot of Wikipedia as he refers to contemporary people and subjects for the time of his writing. Different writers have different attractions for people. Tony Hillerman brings up Navajo Tacos. Agatha Christie's exotic deaths. And so forth. What makes Wodehouse so unique in these short stories is not what subjects he talks about as much as how he articulates. Be aware that after reading “The Man with Two Left Feet” 1917, you may find yourself articulating and people staring.

More from Wodehouse's fantasy world

Another collection of Wodehouse stories, only one of which ("Extricating Young Gussie") is a Bertie Wooster story. Reading these stories at the same time as the first volume of Theodore Sturgeon's complete short stories constantly had me drawing comparisons between the two writers. Wodehouse never wrote fantasy *per se* (that is, Bertie Wooster never encountered a genie or a god in his garden), but in truth his stories were always fantastical. As commentators have said, the idyllic world of young men in spats and authoritative aunts was a figment of Wodehouse's imagination, and never existed at any time in England. I don't think Wodehouse would have disagreed; he knew the power of fantasy. In this volume, he tells one story ("The Mixer") from the point of view of a dog, and one of his habits was to read the entire Shakespeare's collected works every year, and Willy wasn't a stranger to fantasy, either.

The master of comedy strikes again.

Another collection of Wodehouse stories, only one of which ("Extricating Young Gussie") is a Bertie Wooster story. Reading these stories at the same time as the first volume of the Collected Theodore Sturgeon constantly had me drawing comparisons between the two writers. Wodehouse never wrote fantasy *per se* (that is, Bertie Wooster never encountered a genie or a god in his garden), but in truth his stories were always fantastical. As commentators have said, the idyllic world of young men in spats and authoritative aunts was a figment of Wodehouse's imagination, and never existed at any time in England. I don't think Wodehouse would have disagreed; he knew the power of fantasy. In this volume, he tells one story ("The Mixer") from the point of view of a dog, and one of his habits was to read the entire Shakespeare's collected works every year, and Willy wasn't a stranger to fantasy, either. (This "review" originally appeared in First Impressions Installment Twenty-One [http://www.owt.com/users/gcox/fi.contents.html].)