Collected Fables

There is almost nothing of Thurber that doesn't sing to me as clearly as if he were standing next to me asking why I have a tattoo from The Moth And The Star. But he was at his best when he set himself extraordinarily tight word limits, and these fables are the result: economical, surgical, and unforgettable. -- Keith Olbermann Herein lie great words and lines of wit and wisdom as might be read by a father to a son, or, for that matter, a mother to a father while a daughter stands with arms folded and a knowing look. -- Elvis Costello James Thurber taught me how to read. His pictures were so weirdly intriguing that I had to know more, so into the words I went, and things just got funnier. It's one of the longest and most important relationships in my reading life. -- Michael McKean James Thurber was a comedic genius. His fables are not simply parodies of Aesop. They are wry, accurate, and powerful reflections of ourselves, our foibles, our follies, and, above all, our self-importance. And they are very, very funny. -- Neil Gaiman Thurber's genius was to make of our despair a humorous fable. -- John Updike, from Thurber: A Collection of Critical Essays These fables are as cogent and necessary today as they were before and after the Great War when Thurber's plainspoken, satiric fables provided a way to speak out in an era of political suspiciousness, false hopes, and mistrust. These fables are, indeed, for our time. -- Michael J. Rosen, from the Introduction These tiny stories, in which a wide variety of animals show us how human we really are, are completely uproarious. -- Saturday Review of Literature [Thurber] is not only a Landmark in American Humor...in the combination of his prose and pictures he is the funniest artist who ever lived and wrote it too. -- New Republic