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Woody Allen

Author of Without Feathers

214+ Works 14,454 Members 243 Reviews 41 Favorited

About the Author

Allen's favorite personality-the bemused neurotic, the perpetual worrywart, the born loser-dominates his plays, his movies, and his essays. A native New Yorker, Allen attended local schools and despised them, turning early to essay writing as a way to cope with his Since his apprenticeship, writing show more gags for comedians such as Sid Caesar and Garry Moore, the image he projects-of a "nebbish from Brooklyn"-has developed into a personal metaphor of life as a concentration camp from which no one escapes alive. Allen wants to be funny, but isn't afraid to be serious either-even at the same time. His film Annie Hall, co-written with Marshall Brickman and winner of four Academy Awards, was a subtle, dramatic development of the contemporary fears and insecurities of American life. In her review of Love and Death, Judith Christ wrote that Allen was more interested in the character rather than the cartoon, the situation rather than the set-up, and the underlying madness rather than the surface craziness. Later Allen films, such as Crimes and Misdemeanors or Husbands and Wives, take on a far more somber and philosophic tone, which has delighted some critics and appalled others. In Allen's essays and fiction reprinted from the New Yorker, Getting Even New Yorker, (1971), Without Feathers (1975), and Side Effects (1980), the situations and characters don't just speak to us, they are us. (Bowker Author Biography) show less
Image credit: Credit: Colin Swan, 2006, New York City

Works by Woody Allen

Without Feathers (1975) 1,959 copies
Side Effects (1972) 1,606 copies
Getting Even (1971) 1,582 copies
Mere Anarchy (2007) 887 copies
Apropos of Nothing (2020) 377 copies
Woody Allen on Woody Allen (1993) 336 copies
Annie Hall [1977 film] (1977) — Director/Screenwriter/Cast — 320 copies
Midnight in Paris [2011 film] (2011) — Director — 282 copies
Hannah and Her Sisters [1986 film] (1986) — Director — 210 copies
Manhattan [1979 film] (1979) — Director/Screenwriter — 193 copies
Match Point [2005 film] (2005) — Director — 168 copies
Zelig [1983 film] (1983) 126 copies
Blue Jasmine [2013 film] (2013) 116 copies
Scoop [2006 film] (2006) — Director & Screenwriter — 108 copies
Sleeper [1973 film] (1973) 104 copies
Crimes and Misdemeanors [1989 film] (1989) — Director/Screenwriter/Cast — 95 copies
The Purple Rose of Cairo [1985 film] (1985) — Director/Screenwriter/Actor — 93 copies
The Floating Light Bulb (1982) 92 copies
Bananas [1971 film] (1971) 90 copies
Love and Death [1975 film] (1975) — Director/Actor — 85 copies
Take the Money and Run [1969 film] (1969) — Director, Screenwriter & Actor — 85 copies
Radio Days [1987 film] (1987) — Director — 84 copies
Stardust Memories [1980 film] (1980) — Director/Screenwriter — 76 copies
Interiors [1978 film] (1978) — Director — 73 copies
Broadway Danny Rose [1984 film] (1984) — Director — 72 copies
Annie Hall: Screenplay (1981) 62 copies
Shadows and Fog [1991 film] (1991) 57 copies
Play It Again, Sam [1972 film] (1972) — Writer/Cast — 57 copies
Magic in the Moonlight [2014 film] (2015) — Director — 51 copies
Café Society [2016 film] (2016) — Director — 50 copies
To Rome with Love [2012 film] (2012) — Director/Cast — 49 copies
New York Stories [1989 film] (1989) — Director — 46 copies
Whatever Works [2009 film] (2009) 46 copies
Irrational Man (2016) 44 copies
Small Time Crooks [2000 film] (2000) — Director — 43 copies
Husbands and Wives [1992 film] (1992) — Director — 43 copies
You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger [2010 film] (2010) — Director — 41 copies
Manhattan {screenplay} (1981) 41 copies
God (1975) 38 copies
Hollywood Ending [2002 film] (2002) — Screenwriter & Actor — 36 copies
What's New Pussycat? [1965 film] (1965) — Screenwriter/Cast — 35 copies
Another Woman [1988 film] (1988) 34 copies
Alice [1990 film] (1990) — Director — 32 copies
Celebrity [1998 film] (1998) 31 copies
Anything Else [2003 film] (2003) — Director, Screenwriter, Actor — 29 copies
September [1987 film] (2001) — Director — 25 copies
Death Defying Acts (1996) 24 copies
Wonder Wheel [2017 Movie] (2017) — Director & Screenwriter — 24 copies
Death (2011) 21 copies
Inside Woody Allen (1978) 20 copies
The Woody Allen Collection (2012) 15 copies
Comedy Classics: 34 Hilarious Stories (1987) — Contributor; Contributor — 13 copies
Zero Gravity (2022) 13 copies
Standup Comic (1999) 12 copies
Opus 1 et 2 (1980) 12 copies
Woody Allen: A Documentary (2012) 12 copies
Das Beste von Allen (1979) 11 copies
Lunatic's Tale (1986) 8 copies
A szendvics feltalálása (1993) 7 copies
Rifkin's Festival [2020 film] (2020) — Director — 4 copies
Opus 9-10-11-12 (1980) 4 copies
Death Knocks 4 copies
Het feilloze falen van Woody Allen — Author — 3 copies
Déu i altres peces (1999) 2 copies
För egen hand (1979) 2 copies
"Nerv nicht" (1987) 2 copies
Küß mich. (1988) 2 copies
Mr. Big (1996) 2 copies
Woody Allen on Comedy (2001) 2 copies
The Whore of Mensa (2010) 2 copies
Obrona szaleństwa (2010) 1 copy
Woody et Les Robots (2017) 1 copy
Magische Geschichten. (1985) 1 copy
An Apology 1 copy

Associated Works

The Story and Its Writer: An Introduction to Short Fiction (1983) — Contributor — 1,130 copies
Secret Ingredients: The New Yorker Book of Food and Drink (2007) — Contributor — 535 copies
Great Ghost Stories (1985) — Contributor — 394 copies
Wonderful Town: New York Stories from The New Yorker (2000) — Contributor — 354 copies
Telling Tales (2004) — Contributor — 344 copies
Literature: The Human Experience (2006) — Contributor — 338 copies
The Best of Modern Humor (1983) — Contributor — 291 copies
The Treasury of American Short Stories (1981) — Contributor — 267 copies
Antz [1998 film] (1998) — Voice — 251 copies
Russell Baker's Book of American Humor (1993) — Contributor — 207 copies
Casino Royale [1967 film] (1967) — Actor — 198 copies
Nothing But You: Love Stories From The New Yorker (1997) — Contributor — 186 copies
Vampires, Wine, and Roses (1997) — Contributor — 155 copies
The Best American Essays 1991 (1991) — Contributor — 142 copies
Neurotica: Jewish Writers on Sex (1999) — Contributor — 86 copies
Murder for Christmas, Vol. 2 (1982) — Contributor — 86 copies
Blood Thirst: 100 Years of Vampire Fiction (1997) — Contributor — 85 copies
The Vampire Omnibus (1995) — Contributor — 78 copies
Year's Finest Fantasy (1977) — Contributor — 74 copies
Best American Plays: 7th Series, 1967-1973 (1975) — Contributor — 24 copies
The Front [1976 film] (2004) — Actor — 23 copies
Scenes from a Mall [1991 film] (1991) — Actor — 23 copies
The Mammoth Book of Movie Detectives and Screen Crimes (1998) — Contributor — 20 copies
Vampire and Werewolf Stories (1998) — Contributor — 20 copies
Fading Gigolo [2013 film] (2014) — Actor — 18 copies
Picking Up the Pieces [2000 film] (2000) — Actor — 13 copies
The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, 53. Die Trägheit des Auges. (1979) — Contributor, some editions — 10 copies
Wild Man Blues [1997 film] (1997) — self — 8 copies
King Lear [1987 film] (1987) 6 copies
The Sunshine Boys [1996 TV movie] (1999) — Actor — 5 copies
Crime Movies (1996) — Contributor — 4 copies
Enjoying Stories (1987) — Contributor — 2 copies
Always at the Carlyle (2018) 1 copy

Tagged

20th century (92) American (103) American literature (146) anthology (629) autobiography (54) biography (69) cinema (152) collection (81) comedy (554) drama (163) DVD (757) essays (384) fantasy (141) fiction (1,026) film (311) food (83) horror (86) humor (1,888) literature (232) movie (165) movies (58) mystery (47) New York (99) New Yorker (108) non-fiction (225) plays (68) read (113) romance (76) satire (74) screenplay (72) short fiction (48) short stories (848) stories (104) theatre (56) to-read (301) unread (70) USA (120) vampires (56) Woody Allen (511) writing (67)

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Reviews

On memoir as a kind of "Novel in Retreat." Evidently not very much interested in 'memory' ('memoir' not apropos) as much as displaying interest in the screed — we are further troubled that the author appears more interested in what the screed does than in what the screed is, which he appears to mistake for something he has put on the page and not something already displaced into its second movement (see Bernhard), and not as funny as I would have liked.
 
Flagged
Joe.Olipo | 19 other reviews | Jan 1, 2024 |
Thrownness as it happens
 
Flagged
postsign | 19 other reviews | Dec 28, 2023 |
I’ll be real: I couldn’t not read this book because Dylan Farrow doesn’t want me to read it, because she’s like, Love me because my dad is a jackass, right, because, well, let me ask you—

—Is it zero sum?
—Yes.
—And I guess I’m supposed to love you because your dad’s a jackass?
—Yes.
—Well, I don’t know what happened or didn’t happen, all I know is that if it’s zero-sum I have to revert to doing what’s best for myself, which kinda revolves around my life and how My! dad is a jackass. Do you think I could go on tour too, get people to love me because my dad’s a jackass?
—I don’t know your dad.
—He can really play the jackass card, though: in my life, more than yours. He’s a Christian tyrant; wants the Confederates to come back…. Can’t tell a joke. And again, I don’t know who you are or who I’d be if I were you, still less what happened when whatever happened or didn’t happen happened, you know.
—Somehow when you say, “I know”, it makes your convoluted sentences even harder to follow.
—Well, life is lived everyday, you know, right. And, to be honest: and I wasn’t going to tell you this, you know, but the fact that this Woody character has this non-daughter who has a whole persona going being his non-daughter made him more of a standout for me, made me want to see if he could tell a joke….

…. And, of course, the real reason not to read Woody Allen: his work was done about fourteen billion years after the death of Socrates, in Ancient Rome….

And to think it was written in English, and not the language of the birds!

—And it wasn’t even about freeing the masses from non-Marxism! Or from economic distress! All it does is make the worthless fuckers happy! (throws the pencil)

But I forget how that scene goes, now, or when exactly he throws the pencil, so, you know. Roll with it, ok?

…. I kinda like it. It makes me sad, but it’s good; it’s ironic, and how things are. It’s how I thought David Sedaris would be. Sometimes with Dave it was too much like “I am very wise”; with Woody it’s more, “Things are just strange as fuck—the end.” And it’s like: strange as fuck, starting with the people who think they understand, right. The Lost Generation intellectual, you know, who has since turned into a robot who is busy at work in theoretical and practical time travel so that he can get back to the time where he belongs, right….

“Doesn’t have a point of view/Knows not where he’s going to/Making all his nowhere plans for nobody.” The Beatles at Needleman’s funeral

…. I find the absurdity of it reassuring. I decline to defend this feeling logically…. And I doubt I’ll have much more to say, lol. But it’s better than a game show, or, you know, philosophy. Toss up with sports. It depends if Boris Becker gets into a tussle with the line judge, and the announcer guys posh-style make fun of him, and then how you respond to that, you know.

…. Re: absurdity; it’s hard to please a schoolteacher, but I think Woody does a good job of not making untranslatable Latin language puns, without telling dick jokes, you know.

…. “But thus I counsel you, my friends: distrust all in whom the impulse to punish is powerful.” F.N.

I haven’t read the Fredder properly, of course—but reading random quotes online of a philosopher you don’t really understand as a random high schooler with a shitty grasp of reality is the perfect background for reading a book like this, you know….

“Living is easy with eyes closed, misunderstanding all you see….” John Lennon. And if only he’d held onto that, he wouldn’t have spent half of the last decade of his life trying to punish himself and not letting himself succeed, and the other half, well, being John, being John when he’s…. Well, anyway.

…. Which is certainly not to say that Woody is everybody, or that everybody is Woody, or that you could even introduce the two at a party. —Woody, this is everybody. Everybody, this is Woody. I’ll leave you two to messily blur your boundaries…. ~ That is the great failure of classicism, you know, of classics-ism, the idea that in books, men, and even more, women, are nothing, and one man is everything…. It is very male humor. It’s a man’s perspective. But, then, you have seen the goose by the lake; it remains only to find the duck, right…. Don’t hurt it, though; don’t hurt the goose…. And, you know, the 70s was a long time ago now, but if this is not something other than classicism, classics-ology, then, well, (chuckles), that Greek man must be a tenacious wrestler perched on our back, if even Woody couldn’t get him off, right….

…. And, I mean, it is a long time ago—Ah yes, the 70s; “it’s only right, that you should, play the way you feel it”: yes, yes, very droll, I’m sure—part of culture, but also, Over & Done. But tonight on the 24 Hour News Cycle, scientists pave the way to the robot race: and cut out and nom on the part of the brain that does emotions so that we can have better technology and do chess forever. But first: OH MY GOD IS THAT A COLORED MAN ON THE NEWS HE IS A THIEF, GUARD GUARD! I SHOULD NEVER HAVE LEFT COUNTY DOWN THE LAND OF MY ANCESTORS. (beat) Tea?

…. Although for the record, I think that the line should have been, “//Lovers//, they will come and they will go”—but it was a great band, you know.

…. Yeah, I wonder if they had “People” magazine back in the 70s, you know. I’d say “Elle”, but she is (very occasionally) taken by her role as the defender of girlie’s honor, you know.

Anyway, it’s fun. I mean, not honor. What, did you think this was “Angel in the House”? 😸

I mean, if there’s an angel involved, it must be the one from that track, from—I still don’t know why they didn’t call it ‘Made in the //Morning//‘, you know; say what you will of Harry’s boyish good looks, I suppose he’s not all that bright…. 😸

Although if you’ve read all the books, it’s very different, because, because…. Well, because there are lots of allusions, that’s how it’s bloody different, you know. 😹

…. FINAL JUDGMENT: Destroy All Old People, starting with the gerontologists who are about to retire. 👌
… (more)
 
Flagged
goosecap | 16 other reviews | Jul 25, 2023 |
Three short plays. One repetitious topic: extramarital affairs in NYC. One different situation: The second one changes gears midway through.

Occasional humor.

I picked up a copy of this book in a free library outside a store while I was waiting for my order. I overpaid
 
Flagged
Judiex | 1 other review | Jul 7, 2023 |

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Sofia Coppola Writer, Director
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P. G. Wodehouse Contributor
Clive Donner Director
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Alan Alda Actor
Peter Sellers Contributor, Actor
G.K. Chesterton Contributor
L. Frank Baum Contributor
A. A. Milne Contributor
Ben Travers Contributor
Gene Wolfe Contributor
Evan Hunter Contributor
Philip K. Dick Contributor
James Thurber Contributor
Stan McMurtry Contributor
Donald E. Westlake Contributor
Orson Welles Contributor
David L. Stone Contributor
Robert Bloch Contributor
Spike Milligan Contributor
Jerome K. Jerome Contributor
Tom Sharpe Contributor
Terry Pratchett Contributor
Mervyn Peake Contributor
Peter S. Beagle Contributor
Ray Bradbury Contributor
Letty Aronson Producer
Remi Adefarasin Cinematographer
Carlo Di Palma Cinematography
Don Pardo Actor
Owen Roizman Cinematographer
Anna Camp Actor
Sean Penn Actor
Uma Thurman Actress
Capucine Actor
Ian Holm Actor
Hal David Composer
Keye Luke Actor
Jude Law Actor
James Herriot Contributor
Evelyn Waugh Contributor
Benjamin Schwarz Translator
Cathy Berberian Translator
Doretta Gelmini Translator
Alberto Episcopi Translator
Erica Fischer Translator
Josh Kirby Cover artist
Till Bergen Herausgeber
P. F. Paolini Traduttore

Statistics

Works
214
Also by
41
Members
14,454
Popularity
#1,586
Rating
½ 3.7
Reviews
243
ISBNs
621
Languages
27
Favorited
41

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