Crazy Like a Fox

A beloved classic returns: S. J. Perelman's own selection of the very best of his hilarious stories and sketches

Pulitzer Prize–winning author Joshua Cohen (The Netanyahus) reintroduces America's zaniest humorist to a new generation of readers

When asked about himself the writer Sidney Joseph Perelman once quipped, "before they made him, they broke the mold." Nowhere is S. J. Perelman's one-of-a-kind, madcap sensibility—his gift for wordplay, witticism, spoofery, and sheer nonsense—on better display than in his classic collection Crazy Like a Fox, here restored to print for the first time in decades.

In a playful, loving tribute to the funny man, novelist Joshua Cohen—also an erudite wordsmith and punster—introduces Perelman’s sui generis comic pieces to a new generation of readers, certain to fall in love with the writer whom The New York Times once noted for his ability “to transform the common cliché or figure of speech into an exploding cigar.” 

Included here are such beloved classics as:

• the Joycean virtuoso performance “Scenario”
• “A Farewell to Omsk,” Perelman's hilarious homage to Dostoevsky
• and “Farewell, My Lovely Appetizer," his side-splitting send-up of the hardboiled detective fiction of Raymond Chandler

Here is Perelman's own selection of the very best of his inimitable humor, restored to print for the first time in decades."We need Perelman's sublime laughs more than ever." —Andy BorowitzSidney Joseph Perelman (1904–1979) was a longtime contributor to The New Yorker, in which he first published many of his humorous essays and sketches, and travel pieces. He also wrote film scripts for the Marx Brothers and shared an Oscar in 1956 with James Poe and James Farrow for the screenplay of Around the World in Eighty Days. 

Joshua Cohen is the author of The Netanyahus, winner of the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for fiction, and several other works of fiction, including Witz (2010), Book of Numbers (2015), and Moving Kings (2017) as well as the nonfiction work ATTENTION: Dispatches from a Land of Distraction (2018).