“The funniest serious writer to be found on either side of the Atlantic.”

“The beauty of a pun is in the eye of the beholder. . . . For between the punch lines, De Vries shows himself as a lapsed Calvinist who sees the world as a reproach to that incurable hypocrite, man. Irony is De Vries’s weapon, and this collection of fugitive pieces extends his gallery of not always humane inconsistencies.”

“Perhaps it is because his unrestrained use of outrageous puns and similar verbal low comedy is so dazzling that we tend to slight his other talents as a humorist. But the range of his performance is hard to equal. . . . De Vries produces something that is more than brilliant entertainment.”

“Contains some of De Vries’s finest stories . . . . One of the things I appreciate most about [them] is the way they show how humor is a double-edged sword. It can cut through trivial cocktail-party banter to reveal the heart of things, like the jester who’s the only person in the medieval court allowed to mock the pompous king. But it can also be a weapon a speaker wields to keep others away, forming a protective distance of irony. De Vries grasps both possibilities. . . . Lurking beneath these humorous flights is a void these characters do their best to ignore. It goes unspoken, but it shows up in their vanities and their all-too-relatable attempts to be the smartest person in his room. If life is nothing more than a popularity contest, you’d better be damned sure you’re popular.”

“De Vries was an editor at Poetry magazine, a staff writer at The New Yorker, and the author of some two dozen of the wittiest novels you’ll ever read, including the masterworks The Blood of the Lamb and Slouching Toward Kalamazoo, as well as The Tunnel of Love and Reuben, Reuben, just resurrected in handsome paperback by the University of Chicago Press. . . . De Vries is equally deft in the short-form: Without a Stitch in Time—also just reissued by the University of Chicago Press—compiles personal essays and stories in which the uninvited nostalgia of an ex-Calvinist finds itself defenseless against the cleverness of an assertive and secular humorist. Only those with a consummate lack of cleverness wield the word ‘clever’ as an insult, and De Vries demonstrates just how much can be done with a creative intelligence charged by the clever and satirical and ironic. Let us now praise those saints at the University of Chicago Press who possess the smarts and good taste to return to print a peerless American maestro of wit.”

“A decade ago, the off-kilter universe created by Peter De Vries was almost forgotten—his work out of print, relegated to the shelves and Web sites of antiquarian booksellers. But thanks to the University of Chicago Press, which has reissued attractive paperback editions of five of his books so far, the emergency is over.”

“Quick with quips so droll and witty, so penetrating and precise that you almost don’t feel them piercing your pretensions, Peter De Vries was perhaps America’s best comic novelist not named Mark Twain. . . . It’s something of a crime against literature that De Vries, whose novels of the 1950s and early ’60s made wonderful sport of postwar striving, the middle-class move to the suburbs, and generational clashes that would render major cultural shifts just a few years hence, has mostly been forgotten. . . . Literature—in the form of the University of Chicago Press—is making amends for its lapses by re-issuing the best of De Vries’ works, five comic tomes long out of print.”