The Man Who Disliked Cats

by P.G. Wodehouse

Genres: Audiobook, Humor

26 pages, Paperback

Published December 18, 2012

About the author

Sir Pelham Grenville Wodehouse, KBE, was a comic writer who enjoyed enormous popular success during a career of more than seventy years and continues to be widely read over 40 years after his death. Despite the political and social upheavals that occurred during his life, much of which was spent in France and the United States, Wodehouse's main canvas remained that of prewar English upper-class society, reflecting his birth, education, and youthful writing career.

An acknowledged master of English prose, Wodehouse has been admired both by contemporaries such as Hilaire Belloc, Evelyn Waugh and Rudyard Kipling and by more recent writers such as Douglas Adams, Salman Rushdie and Terry Pratchett. Sean O'Casey famously called him "English literature's performing flea", a description that Wodehouse used as the title of a collection of his letters to a friend, Bill Townend.

Best known today for the Jeeves and Blandings Castle novels and short stories, Wodehouse was also a talented playwright and lyricist who was part author and writer of fifteen plays and of 250 lyrics for some thirty musical comedies. He worked with Cole Porter on the musical Anything Goes (1934) and frequently collaborated with Jerome Kern and Guy Bolton. He wrote the lyrics for the hit song Bill in Kern's Show Boat (1927), wrote the lyrics for the Gershwin/Romberg musical Rosalie (1928), and collaborated with Rudolf Friml on a musical version of The Three Musketeers (1928).

Reviews

[Brittany Parker · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is an amusing tale of how one man’s life would have been so much better if he could just stop treating cats horribly.

[George Ilsley · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a pre-World War I story, and like many Wodehouse stories from that time (before he had forged his template) is based on a story told to the narrator in a cafe. The reader becomes, then, almost a listener to the tale, as if overheard from the next table.

It’s Wodehouse, and from that title the plot is more or less paraded on view ahead of time. The delight comes from how PG manages to keep twisting the elements to be even more preposterous.

A delightful story, calming and satisfying in a stressful moment.

[Amrita · Rating 3 out of 5]

A pageturner and a rather satisfying one at that. Take that cat-hater , that's what you get for being one ! :P

[Asha Seth · Rating 3 out of 5]

Ah! What a merry little pleasure reading this short-story was! Just about what you need after a tiresome day.

[Forked Radish · Rating 4 out of 5]

Another catastrophic cat caper.

[Rebecca Heywood · Rating 4 out of 5]

Cute short story. I like cats, so I didn’t like this character much, but it was a fun story.

[Lindsay · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was the first non-Jeeves Wodehouse story I'd read, and it was ever bit as delightful as the Jeeves stuff. I loved the Frenchman's misusing of American colloquialisms. Indeed, I always love how Wodehouse loves him some Americans.

[Laura Verret · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is the story of a man whose life (occupation, romance, etc.) is disrupted by a cat named Alexander. It is a humorous story, but as a Girl Who Loves Cats, I could not sympathize very terribly with his plight. :D

[Josh · Rating 4 out of 5]

Funniest non-Wooster and Jeeves Wodehouse story I have read so far.