Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Unavailable
    Mere Anarchy
    Unavailable
    Mere Anarchy
    Unavailable
    Mere Anarchy
    Ebook152 pages2 hours

    Mere Anarchy

    By Woody Allen

    3/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    “I am greatly relieved that the universe is finally explainable. I was beginning to think it was me.”–Woody Allen

    Here, in his first collection since his three hilarious classics Getting Even, Without Feathers, and Side Effects, Woody Allen has managed to write a book that not only answers the most profound questions of human existence but is the perfect size to place under any short table leg to prevent wobbling.

    “I awoke Friday, and because the universe is expanding it took me longer than usual to find my robe,” he explains in a piece on physics called “Strung Out.” In other flights of inspirational sanity we are introduced to a cast of characters only Allen could imagine: Jasper Nutmeat, Flanders Mealworm, and the independent film mogul E. Coli Biggs, just to name a few. Whether he is writing about art, sex, food, or crime (“Pugh has been a policeman as far back as he can remember. His father was a notorious bank robber, and the only way Pugh could get to spend time with him was to apprehend him”) he is explosively funny.

    In “This Nib for Hire,” a Hollywood bigwig comes across an author’s book in a little country store and describes it in a way that aptly captures this magnificent volume: “Actually,” the producer says, “I’d never seen a book remaindered in the kindling section before.”
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherRandom House Publishing Group
    Release dateJun 12, 2007
    ISBN9781588366207
    Unavailable
    Mere Anarchy

    Read more from Woody Allen

    Related to Mere Anarchy

    Related ebooks

    Humor & Satire For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      Notes From A Nothing

      Feb 14, 2020

      Notes From A Nothing
      13 min read

    • Article

      Dark Tales

      Dec 2, 2021

      Dark Tales
      6 min read

    • Article

      The Long Way Home

      Nov 11, 2020

      The Long Way Home
      4 min read

    • Article

      Why the Egg Matters

      Mar 2, 2020

      Why the Egg Matters
      9 min read

    • Article

      Bright Passage

      Mar 8, 2022

      Bright Passage
      19 min read

    • Article

      Retriever of Souls

      Nov 25, 2021

      What they don’t say is that, sometimes God will call you to the wilderness, gesture toward the trees, and then, hang back and wave you on alone. —“Prayer for the Wretched Among Us” from The Virginia State Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded At nig

      18 min read

    • Article

      Two Poems by Phillip B. Williams

      Dec 15, 2017

      The masters are yet dead. Wanting to be human,I tried to rewrite The Waste Land. The canon’s reachcasts ruinous light. The masters’ pens breachthis page where, above, my own hand spectates. Babylonrisen, exorcism in reverse, whose nature upended now?

      6 min read

    • Article

      When Life Bites

      Sep 14, 2020

      When Life Bites
      6 min read

    • Article

      Solo (wo)man

      Sep 4, 2023

      Solo (wo)man
      5 min read

    • Article

      The Isolation That Forged Me

      Mar 6, 2022

      The Isolation That Forged Me
      3 min read

    • Article

      A Rear Old Time

      May 9, 2021

      A Rear Old Time
      7 min read

    • Article

      Opinion: What Using Animals For Scientific Research Taught Me About Myself

      Mar 11, 2019

      When I looked for the deeper meaning of existence, I found that I was too skeptical for heaven and hell, for deities and spirits. I found it in a research…

      7 min read

    • Article

      What The Magpie Says

      Oct 16, 2022

      What The Magpie Says
      8 min read

    • Article

      The Mirror Test

      Dec 1, 2020

      always squeeze bread to make sure it’s fresh; butwhat if the baker won’t let me feel the bread?;you mean to say that after all you are really goingto be the kind of woman who the baker won’t letnear the bread? —Jamaica Kincaid, “Girl” In the eighteen

      19 min read

    • Article

      Five Poems

      Jul 1, 2022

      You have to go back to being immature,a timed regression essentialto running up a further lifetime of debt. I owe you, the polar bear says,an icy French OUI. A kiss on both cheeks,plus a wish to sit on a bench at the center of a green-painted park,yo

      3 min read

    • Article

      The Hidden Origins of Mankind

      Nov 12, 2019

      The Hidden Origins of Mankind
      8 min read

    • Article

      Holding Hands With A Chimp

      Dec 13, 2018

      Revelation comes in different forms for different people. A biblical verse. A flash of recognition in a lover’s eyes. A Nietzschean proverb. A classical sonata. A child’s embrace. Any moment of profundity, really, where time stops and the divine reve

      4 min read

    • Article

      Letting Go

      Oct 29, 2021

      Letting Go
      7 min read

    • Article

      Letting Go

      Oct 30, 2021

      Letting Go
      7 min read

    • Article

      Reports From Near And Far

      Nov 25, 2021

      susanne paola antonetta MY HOMETOWN of Bellingham, Washington, is a last corner of the continental United States, a final chew of land before the long drink of the Pacific. We’re bound to the west by water, to the east by mountain, and twenty miles t

      17 min read

    • Article

      The Isolation That Forged Me

      Jun 24, 2021

      The Isolation That Forged Me
      3 min read

    Reviews for Mere Anarchy

    3/5

    173 ratings5 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 4/5
      I’ve been laughing at Woody Allen for a very long time. Some of these stories first appeared in magazines in 2000, and many of them seem much older and out-of-date than that. I read and laughed at this book for the first time not long after it came out in 2007. It had been 25 years since he had released a collection at that time. I don’t believe that the controversy over Woody’s personal life has changed how funny I find his work, but I do find some of the old stylings tired and dated. There were very few of these pieces that seem original or fresh. After decades of laughing at his material, it feels like he’s just returning to the same old well … too many times. Remember when people would always ask if the newest Woody Allen movie was one of his “funny” ones? I was such a fan then that I found them all interesting. The way his mind worked was always interesting. I had many conversations/arguments about movies like Interiors, which I found deliciously depressing. So it is down to the possibilities that: 1) maybe I’ve moved on in my life and tastes, or 2) this 84 year old man isn’t as new and fresh as I found him decades ago. I laughed many times reading this collection, but I also groaned at other times—when he seemed like a tired 1950s and 1960s comedian performing in some comedy dive filled with cigarette smoke and drunks. Humor can be very fickle at times.
    • 3/5
      The first pieces in this collection are exercises in showing off, virtually unreadable without a dictionary, a Yiddish phrase book and "in" knowledge of New York and Hollywood personalities. Even so equipped, you wouldn't laugh much. The last four stories are more like the "old" Allen, absurdist and often hilarious.
    • 5/5
      I love Allen's short stories. Distilled essence of bizarre genius hilarity.
    • 5/5
      The choice word for the short stories of Woody Allen is 'Absurd'. But in reading this collection I did not find much to be absurd. What I found there instead was a biting attack on those absurd parts of our society that have made life in our times seem ridiculous. This collection more than Without Feathers seems grounded into our society, in order to critique it. A story like Whore of Mensa, from Without Feathers, seems like an absurdists revision. It is a fine story indeed, but less grounded in what one could consider the reality of the times. The stories in this collection seemed to function like the best of mythology, revealing inner truths about our society. These stories were, in their absurdity, far from absurd.
    • 2/5
      Woody Allen feels out of step here, and seems to think his readers won't notice as long as he talks quickly and dizzyingly.