Hey, guys! I made a similar post about a year ago, and I’ve checked out the authors that were recommended to me then, so felt like it was time to make a new post)
O. Henry is one of my favorite writers and I really enjoy his style of writing (which exhibits interesting allusions, similes, metaphors, clever turns of phrase, made-up words and words which are purposefully used incorrectly for the humorous effect, etc.).
I was hoping you could recommend some other writers or stand-alone novels/stories (of any genre) which I might like if I love O. Henry’s witty manner of storytelling and funny dialogues (“surprise twists” at the end are not necessary– I’m only just looking for a compelling and witty writing).
Just to let you know, I’ve read Mark Twain, Joseph Heller, Robert Sheckley, Saki, Douglas Adams, Terry Pratchett, Jerome K. Jerome, Roald Dahl, P.G. Wodehouse, Stephen Leacock, Nick Harkaway, James Thurber, John Collier, Oscar Wilde, and some of the others that I can’t recall right now, but i didn't feel like that their writing style was all that similar to O. Henry's – though i liked most of those authors (i enjoy Twain, Sheckley, Saki and Heller as much as O.Henry). The writers that felt similar to O. Henry were Saki and maybe Twain to a certain extent.
To give you an example of the kind of humour and writing style that I find entertaining, here are some excerpts from O. Henry’s work:
“He had blond curls and laughing blue eyes and was featured regular. They said he was a ringer for the statue they call Herr Mees, the god of speech and eloquence resting in some museum at Rome. Some German anarchist, I suppose. They are always resting and talking…”
"He possessed illegal convictions in his mind along the subjects of black cats, lucky numbers, and the weather predictions in the papers."
" “I never exactly heard sour milk dropping out of a balloon on the bottom of a tin pan, but I have an idea it would be music of the spears compared to this attenuated stream of asphyxiated thought that emanates out of your organs of conversation. The kind of half- masticated noises that you emit every day puts me in mind of a cow’s cud, only she’s lady enough to keep hers to herself, and you ain’t.” "
A dialogue from his story “Telemachus, friend”:
" “‘I reckon you understand,’ says Paisley, ‘that I’ve made up my mind to accrue that widow woman as part and parcel in and to my hereditaments forever, both domestic, sociable, legal, and otherwise, until death us do part.’
“‘Why, yes,’ says I, ‘I read it between the lines, though you only spoke one.’
‘I’d give in to you,’ says he, ‘in most any respect if it was secular affairs, but this is not so. The smiles of woman,’ goes on Paisley, ‘is the whirlpool of Squills and Chalybeates, into which vortex the good ship Friendship is often drawn and dismembered.’
“And then I collaborates with myself, and offers the following resolutions and by-laws…"
A dialogue from his story “Two renegades”:
“ Then and there those Colombians… dragged me before a military court. The presiding general went through the usual legal formalities that sometimes cause a case to hang on the calendar of a South American military court as long as ten minutes. He asked me my age, and then sentenced me to be shot.
“They woke up the court interpreter, an American named Jenks, who was in the rum business and vice versa, and told him to translate the verdict.
“Jenks stretched himself and took a morphine tablet.
“‘You’ve got to back up against th’ ‘dobe, old man,’ says he to me. ‘Three weeks, I believe, you get. Haven’t got a chew of fine-cut on you, have you?’
“‘Translate that again, with foot-notes and a glossary,’ says I. ‘I don’t know whether I’m discharged, condemned, or handed over to the Gerry Society.’
“‘Oh,’ says Jenks, ‘don’t you understand? You’re to be stood up against a ‘dobe wall and shot in two or three weeks — three, I think, they said.’
“‘Would you mind asking ‘em which?’ says I. ‘A week don’t amount to much after you’re dead, but it seems a real nice long spell while you are alive.’
“‘It’s two weeks,’ says the interpreter, after inquiring in Spanish of the court. ‘Shall I ask ‘em again?’
“‘Let be,’ says I. ‘Let’s have a stationary verdict. If I keep on appealing this way they’ll have me shot about ten days before I was captured. No, I haven’t got any fine-cut.’
“Then I gives a silver dollar to one of the guards to send for the United States consul. He comes around in pajamas, with a pair of glasses on his nose and a dozen or two inside of him.
“‘I’m to be shot in two weeks,’ says I. ‘And although I’ve made a memorandum of it, I don’t seem to get it off my mind. You want to call up Uncle Sam on the cable as quick as you can and get him all worked up about it.’
“‘Now, see here, O’Keefe,’ says the consul, getting the best of a hiccup, ‘what do you want to bother the State Department about this matter for?’
“‘Didn’t you hear me?’ says I; ‘I’m to be shot in two weeks. Did you think I said I was going to a lawn-party?”.
A dialogue from his story “A moment of victory”:
“’I don’t want my name on any list except the list of survivors. But I’ve noticed you, Sam,’ says I, ‘seeking the bubble notoriety. Now, what do you do it for? Is it ambition, business, or some freckle-faced Phœbe at home that you are heroing for?’
“‘Well, Ben,’ says Sam, ‘ a major gets more pay than a captain, and I need the money.’
“‘Correct for you!’ says I. ‘I can understand that. Your system of fame-seeking is rooted in the deepest soil of patriotism. But I can’t comprehend,’ says I, ‘why Willie Robbins, who used to be as meek and undesirous of notice as a cat with cream on his whiskers, should all at once develop into a warrior bold with the most fire-eating kind of proclivities. He wants his name, maybe, to go thundering down the coroners of time.’
“Well, Willie sure made good as a hero. He got three or four bullets planted in various parts of his autonomy; and he began to accumulate medals for all kinds of things — heroism and target-shooting and uninsubordination. I never saw a illustriouser-looking human in my life than Willie was.”
Excerpts from a dialogue from his story “He also serves”:
“‘Hunky,’ says High Jack Snakefeeder, looking at me funny, ‘do you believe in reincarnation?’…
“‘You’re drunk,’ says I. ‘Believing in — what was it? — recarnalization?’…
“‘I felt it all the time,’ says he. ‘I’m the reconsideration of the god Locomotorataxia.’…
“In a few minutes in comes the girl with the flower wreath. ‘I wonder,’ says I to myself, ‘if she has been reincarcerated, too?“
From Cabbages and kings:
“Me and Henry Horsecollar brought the first phonograph to this country. Henry was a quarter-breed, quarter-back Cherokee, educated East in the idioms of football, and West in contraband whisky.
“‘The Latin races,’ says Henry, explaining easy in the idioms he learned at college, ‘are peculiarly adapted to be victims of the phonograph. They have the artistic temperament.’
“‘Then,’ says I, ‘we’ll export canned music to the Latins; but I’m mindful of Mr. Julius Cæsar’s account of ‘em where he says: “Omnia Gallia in tres partes divisa est;” which is the same as to say, “We will need all of our gall in devising means to tree them parties.”’
“I hated to make a show of education; but I was disinclined to be overdone in syntax by a mere Indian, a member of a race to which we owe nothing except the land on which the United States is situated. “
From “The hiding of Black Bill”
“I herded sheep for five days; and then the wool entered my soul. That getting next to Nature certainly got next to me. I was lonesomer than Crusoe’s goat.
“‘Mr. Ogden,’ says I, ‘you and me have got to get sociable. I’ve got to do something in an intellectual line, if it’s only to knock somebody’s brains out.’
“‘I have never yet went back on a friend. I’ve stayed by ‘em when they had plenty, and when adversity’s overtaken me I’ve never forsook ‘em.’
P.S.
One other work that i felt was akin to O.Henry's clever writing and the one i enjoyed a lot was Steve Toltz’s novel “A fraction of the whole”.
Thank you!
by reductoabsurdum