The Best of Bad Faulkner

Culled from the popular Harry’s Bar and American Grill parody competition started in 1978, The Best of Bad Hemingway, Vol. II easily outstrips its spin-off volume, The Best of Bad Faulkner. In such stories as ”The Old Man and the P.C.” and ”Al’s Welfare to Farms,” Papa Hemingway spoofers concoct manly scenarios in which renegade steaks are gunned down in restaurants and men worry about the size of their typewriters. The faux Faulkners have their moments (”The bear, which was called Old Jeb, was old; so old in fact that he could remember when Carson was still funny”), but this contest, sponsored by American Way magazine, the Yoknapatawpha Press, and the Center for the Study of Southern Culture hasn’t yielded much more than impeccably styled run-on sentences. Hemingway is clearly the easier target, even though, as he said, ”the step up from writing parodies is writing on the wall above the urinal.” Hemingway: B-