Books: The Unstuffed Owl

PARODIES—AN ANTHOLOGY FROM CHAUCER TO BEERBOHM AND AFTER (574 pp.) —Dwight Macdonald—Random House ($7.50).

Police mamma Helen mother please take me out. Come on open the soap duckets. The chimney sweeps. Talk to the sword. Shut up you got a big mouth! Please help me get up. Henry Max come over here. French Canadian bean soup. I want to pay. Let them leave me alone . . .

This flawless (because meaningless) fragment of prose is offered as a parody of the once-famed gibberish of Gertrude Stein, and is the work of an unknown writer,...