Synopses & Reviews
The literary event of 2001 is now the paperback event of 2002:
The Collected Stories of Richard Yates gathers the late author's powerful and peerless short fiction in one comprehensive volume. Praised by such authors as Michael Chabon, Stewart O'Nan, Robert Stone, and Richard Russo, and universally acclaimed in reviews across the country,
The Collected Stories is the crowning jewel in what has been the rediscovery of one of our greatest American writers.
Review
"These stringent, ruthlessly straightforward (yet never, thank God, 'minimalist') stories are set mostly in the late '40s and '50s, yet they're perfect reading for right now, when we're just starting to reacquaint ourselves with economic downturn and widespread economic anxiety, when our political discourse is insipid and our mass culture seems more vacuous than ever. In their measured, crystalline prose, Yates' stories make us ask how we ever expected so much in the first place." Maria Russo, Salon.com (read the entire Salon.com review)
Synopsis
The literary event of 2001 is now the paperback event of 2002: The Collected Stories of Richard Yates gathers the late author's powerful and peerless short fiction in one comprehensive volume. Praised by such authors as Michael Chabon, Stewart O'Nan, Robert Stone, and Richard Russo, and universally acclaimed in reviews across the country, The Collected Stories is the crowning jewel in what has been the rediscovery of one of our greatest American writers.
Synopsis
A literary event of the highest order, The Collected Stories of Richard Yates brings together Yates's peerless short fiction in a single volume for the first time.
Richard Yates was acclaimed as one of the most powerful, compassionate, and technically accomplished writers of America's postwar generation, and his work has inspired such diverse talents as Richard Ford, Ann Beattie, Andr Dubus, Robert Stone, and Kurt Vonnegut Jr. This collection, as powerful as Yate's beloved Revolutionary Road, contains the stories of his classic works Eleven Kinds of Loneliness (a book The New York Times Book Review hailed as the New York equivalent of Dubliners) and Liars in Love; it also features nine new stories, seven of which have never been published.
Whether addressing the smothered desire of suburban housewives, the white-collar despair of Manhattan office workers, the grim humor that attends life on a tuberculosis ward, or the moments of terrified peace experienced by American soldiers in World War II, Yates examines every frayed corner of the American dream. His stories, as empathetic as they are unforgiving, are like no others in our nation's literature. Published with a moving introduction by the novelist Richard Russo, this collection will stand as its author's final masterpiece.
About the Author
Richard Yates was the author of the novels
Revolutionary Road, A Special Providence, Disturbing the Peace, The Easter Parade, A Good School, Young Hearts Crying, and
Cold Spring Harbor, as well as the short story collections
Eleven Kinds of Loneliness and
Liars in Love. He died in 1992.
Table of Contents
Introduction: Secret Hearts by Richard Russo
From ELEVEN KINDS OF LONELINESS
Doctor Jack-o'-Lantern
The Best of Everything
Jody Rolled the Bones
No Pain Whatsoever
A Glutton for Punishment
A Wrestler with Sharks
Fun with a Stranger
The B.A.R. Man
A Really Good Jazz Piano
Out with the Old
Builders
From LIARS IN LOVE
Oh, Joseph, I'm So Tired
A Natural Girl
Trying Out for the Race
Liars in Love
A Compassionate Leave
Regards at Home
Saying Goodbye to Sally
THE UNCOLLECTED STORIES
The Canal
A Clinical Romance
Bells in the Moming
Evening on the Cote d'Azur
Thieves
A Private Possession
The Comptroller and the Wild Wind
A Last Fling, Like
A Convalescent Ego