Over a five-year period in the late 1940s and early 1950s, regular readers of The New Yorker were treated to humorist S. J. Perelman’s “Cloudland Revisited” series, witty and withering reviews of the pulp fiction and silent films that had enthralled the comic genius in his youth. Among the once-innocent-now-guilty pleasures featured were George Barr McCutcheon’s 1901 historical fantasy novel Graustark—the Game of Thrones of its era; Gertrude Atherton’s sensationalist fantasy Black Oxen; Sax Rohmer’s blockbuster supervillain novel The Mystery of Dr. Fu-Manchu; and the “underwater” silent film adaptation of Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea. Largely forgotten when the series originally appeared, and unknown to many today, these and other works enjoy a hilarious second life in Perelman’s unjustly neglected masterpiece.

All twenty-two of Perelman’s backward glances are brought together for the first time in this deluxe paperback edition. In his introduction, Adam Gopnik, another beloved New Yorker writer, reflects on the pleasures of the “Cloudland” series and how it anticipates our own pop-culture obsessions. The series “set the pattern for the American pop-art memoir,” Gopnik writes, “where a literary life is revealed through its engagement not with the high culture of its time but in a kind of meta-tussle with its mass-market overcharge, in a tone by turns affectionate, exasperated, nostalgic, and ironic.”

Sidney Joseph Perelman (1904–1979) was a longtime contributor to The New Yorker, in which he first published many of his humorous essays and sketches. He also wrote film scripts for the Marx Brothers and shared an Oscar in 1956 with James Poe and James Farrow for the screenplay of Around the World in Eighty Days.

Adam Gopnik is a staff writer for The New Yorker; he has written for the magazine since 1986. He has three National Magazine awards, for essays and for criticism, and also a George Polk Award for Magazine Reporting. The author of numerous best-selling books, including Paris to the Moon, he lives in New York City.