My Ears Are Bent (Vintage) | 
| Author: Joseph Mitchell
Publisher: Vintage
Category: Book
List Price: $13.95
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Avg. Customer Rating:  9 reviews
Sales Rank: 113614
Media: Paperback
Edition: Reprint
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 320
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.7
Dimensions (in): 7.9 x 5.1 x 0.9
ISBN: 0375726306
Dewey Decimal Number: 306
EAN: 9780375726309
ASIN: 0375726306
Publication Date: July 8, 2008
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Product Description
As a young newspaper reporter in 1930s New York, Joseph Mitchell interviewed fan dancers, street evangelists, voodoo conjurers, not to mention a lady boxer who also happened to be a countess. Mitchell haunted parts of the city now vanished: the fish market, burlesque houses, tenement neighborhoods, and storefront churches. Whether he wrote about a singing first baseman for the Brooklyn Dodgers or a nudist who does a reverse striptease, Mitchell brilliantly illuminated the humanity in the oddest New Yorkers.
These pieces, written primarily for The World-Telegram and The Herald Tribune, highlight his abundant gifts of empathy and observation, and give us the full-bodied picture of the famed New Yorker writer Mitchell would become.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 4 more reviews...
 A LOST TIME AND PLACE RECAPTURED July 16, 2008
7 out of 8 found this review helpful
My Ears Are Bent first published in 1938 is quintessential Joseph Mitchell, and that's saying quite a bit as many would call him the best writer to ever work at the New Yorker. The pieces included in this volume were written prior to his tenure at the New Yorker, years he worked as a writer for The World, The Herald Tribune, and The World-Telegram. His beat, his love, his passion was New York City, and for that we are the beneficiaries as he captured what is now a lost time and place with humor, grace, and piercing reportorial eye. His words mirror sights, sounds, emotions and, yes, even smells and tastes.
One is tempted to say that he knew and interviewed people from all walks of life, but it is more accurate to say that many of his subjects were from the periphery of life. There is Miss Mazie, a flamboyant blonde former burlesque dancer with a heart of gold who owns a small movie theater in the Bowery. She sits in a tiny ticket booth each night with her small dog in her lap. It never bothers her that "Sometimes a bum goes in there at 10 o'clock in the morning, and at midnight he is still there, sleeping in his seat, snoring as if he owns the joint." After all, Miss Mazie reasons everyone needs a place to sleep. She never turns down a panhandler, has never met a man good enough to marry, and dreams of becoming a nun. However, as she says, "I am practically a nun now. The only difference between me and a nun is that I smoke, drink booze, and talk rough."
Mitchell describes the most interesting athlete he ever interviewed, a second-rate ball player who later became known as Billy Sunday, a memorable Christian evangelist; he chats with a very young Gene Krupa, and a 60-year-old George M. Cohan. Not one to be attracted only to the famous he pens unforgettable lines about an 81-year-old woman just arrived from Ischia. She's taken aback by the city but feels quite at home once she is in her son's grocery story among the scent of olive oil and chunky Parma hams.
Each of the articles and short stories in this collection is filled with wit, empathy, and understanding. Mitchell is one of a kind and so are the people of whom he wrote.
Highly recommended.
- Gail Cooke
Mighty Oaks From (Not So) Little Acorns Grow July 14, 2008
That the pieces in this collection are actually juvenilia is astounding; Mitchell wrote these essays while in his twenties and working as a reporter for the respective New York dailies the Herald Tribune and World. Many of the themes that the great man would hone and develop for Ross's New Yorker are here, in nascent form. Dick's Bar, which he would later bemoan as a casualty of repeal and the bar fixture industry (seriously) is still in it's full glory -- that eminent editor of the "greatest afternoon newspaper in the United States" imitating a tree frog. Interestingly, Mitchell as he appears in these pages drinks "nothing stronger than Moxie." Frequent quoting of interesting, slightly disreputable characters is here as well. New Yorkers that miss the eccentric oddballs that used to be a staple of their city need look no further than this volume to recapture a sense of them.
I would, however, advise those who aren't familiar with his material in "Up at The Old Hotel," to read those articles first, but if you are a fan you will find nothing to disappoint. Some probably remember Jimmy Breslin's accusation of racial prejudice against Mitchell when this collection came out, so I braced myself for out-dated and ugly stereotypes; although there is some of the former Mitchell certainly doesn't come off as a racist. I suspect Breslin had his own doubts at subjecting a 1930's reporter (he never styled himself as a sociologist or opinion writer) to Millennial revisionism. And that Mitchell was just, after all, a journalist is the most impressive thing about his writing.
 My Ears Are Bent -- A Little November 10, 2006
I enjoyed this collection of Mitchell articles, but it is really something that I think is for his hardcore fans. Readers will notice that some of the material -- in some cases, almost word for word -- became more polished articles later that appeared in his better known "Up in the Old Hotel" collection, and others in "Bent" simply aren't as lyrical, as you would expect since he was writing for newspapers and not, as later, The New Yorker.
My Ears Are Bent July 28, 2005
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
Joseph Mitchell's newspaper writing is Mitchell at his best; young, fresh and delightful. He tells in 1500 or so words booklength stories made all the more powerful by the brevity.
A text book on writing and reporting.
Any Joesph Mitchell fan will find something here to like July 31, 2002
19 out of 19 found this review helpful
A Joseph Mitchell anything is worth my time, but after having read UP IN THE OLD HOTEL, other writings will suffer by comparison. The works in this particular volume are a compilation of Mitchell's newspaper stories from the 1930s. While Mitchell's prose is sharp and illuminating, the subject matter comes off as slight compared to Mitchell's other labors. Mitchell had such a reputation for wanting his magazine stories to be perfect that these newspaper stories have the sense of being rushed to the presses. Having said that, there are some great moments in the book. The book has a nice profile section of 1930s cartoonists, which is just the kind of subject matter that Mitchell handles well in that it gets past the part that everyone sees to the part Mitchell wants to know about. The section on Voodoo is hysterical and very much like his later New Yorker work. The book ends with a funny profile of playwright George Bernard Shaw. If you have never read Mitchell, start with UP IN THE OLD HOTEL, but if you are already a fan, there are enough gems in this collection to make it worth your while.
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