Dorothy Parker Drank Here
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
The acid-tongued Dorothy Parker is back and haunting the halls of the Algonquin with her piercing wit, audacious voice, and unexpectedly tender wisdom.
Heavenly peace? No, thank you. Dorothy Parker would rather wander the famous halls of the Algonquin Hotel, drink in hand, searching for someone, anyone, who will keep her company on this side of eternity.
After forty years she thinks she’s found the perfect candidate in Ted Shriver, a brilliant literary voice of the 1970s, silenced early in a promising career by a devastating plagiarism scandal. Now a prickly recluse, he hides away in the old hotel slowly dying of cancer, which he refuses to treat. If she can just convince him to sign the infamous guestbook of Percy Coates, Dorothy Parker might be able to persuade the jaded writer to spurn the white light with her. Ted, however, might be the only person living or dead who’s more stubborn than Parker, and he rejects her proposal outright.
When a young, ambitious TV producer, Norah Wolfe, enters the hotel in search of Ted Shriver, Parker sees another opportunity to get what she wants. Instead, she and Norah manage to uncover such startling secrets about Ted’s past that the future changes for all of them.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Dorothy Parker may be dead, but in Meister's fifth novel her spirit still hangs around New York City's famous Algonquin Hotel bar, bumming drinks and cigarettes from unsuspecting mortals. It's 2007, and Parker is lonely at the Algonquin all her literary drinking pals from the Algonquin Round Table era are dead and gone. She, however, gets to stay at the hotel because she signed the old hotel manager's magical guest book, which grants residence after death (and the drinks are free). Now Parker, looking for an afterlife drinking companion, selects a hotel recluse: cantankerous Ted Shriver, a 1970s literary genius disgraced by a plagiarism scandal, who is dying of a brain tumor. She just needs Shriver to sign the guest book before he dies. Shriver is a mean drunk, determined to die alone in his hotel room without ever revealing the truth about the plagiarism scandal. Meanwhile, Norah Wolfe, a young associate producer of a failing TV show, thinks she can advance her career if she can convince Shriver to appear on her show. Eventually, Wolfe and Parker team up to weaken Shriver's resolve, and they discover Shriver is not who he seems to be. This is a wacky tale with hilarious cameo appearances by some of Dorothy Parker's favorite dead celebrities Robert Benchley, Tallulah Bankhead, Groucho Marx, and Lillian Hellman and liberally sprinkled with Parker's signature acerbic humor, wisecracks, and put-downs.
