William Sydney Porter known by his pen name O. Henry, was an American short story writer. His wit and plot twists were adored by his readers, but often panned by the critics. "Collected Short Stories" is a collection of humorous and sentimental stories of sheepherders, cowpunchers, trail cooks, prospectors, outlaws, and Texas Rangers that offer the modern reader a window into American West. Perhaps reflecting O. Henry's own experience as a young man in the middle of nowhere, where women were few and far between, many of the stories are comic tales of romantic rivalry.
Collected Stories includes both volumes of the National Book Award–winning author Shirley Hazzard’s short-story collections—Cliffs of Fall and People in Glass Houses—alongside uncollected works and two previously unpublished stories Shirley Hazzard's Collected Stories is a work of staggering breadth and accomplishment. Taken together, these twenty-eight short stories are masterworks in telescoping focus, ranging from quotidian struggles between beauty and pragmatism to satirical send-ups of international bureaucracy, from the Italian countryside to suburban Connecticut. Hazzard's heroes are high-minded romantics who attempt to fit their feelings into the twentieth-century world of office jobs and dreary marriages. After all, as she writes in "The Picnic," "It was tempting to confine oneself to what one could cope with. And one couldn't cope with love." And yet it is the comedy, the tragedy, and the splendor of love, the pursuit and the absence of it, that animates Hazzard's stories and provides the truth and beauty that her protagonists seek. Hazzard once said, "The idea that somebody has expressed something, in a supreme way, that it can be expressed; this is, I think, an enormous feature of literature." Her stories themselves are a supreme evocation of writing at its very best: probing, uncompromising, and deeply felt.
Ruskin Bond wrote his first short story, ‘Untouchable’, at the age of sixteen, and has written memorable fiction ever since. He is famous not only for his love of the hills, but for imbuing the countryside with life and vibrancy through moving descriptions. The simple people who inhabit his stories evoke sympathy and laughter in equal measure. This wonderful collection of seventy stories, including classics like ‘A Face in Dark’, ‘The Kitemaker’, ‘The Tunnel’, ‘The Room of Many Colours’, ‘Dust on the Mountain’ and ‘Times Stops at Shamli’, is a must-have for any bookshelf.
New to Penguin Classics, the remarkable, devastating collected stories by the author of Wide Sargasso Sea. Some of Jean Rhys's most powerful writing is to be found in this rich, dark collection of her collected stories. Her fictional world is haunted by her own, painful memories: of cheap hotels and drab Parisian cafés; of devastating love affairs; of her childhood in Dominica; of drifting through European cities, always on the periphery and always perilously close to the abyss. Rendered in extraordinarily vivid, honest prose, these stories show Rhys at the height of her literary powers and offer a fascinating counterpoint to her most famous novel, Wide Sargasso Sea. This volume includes all the stories from her three collections,The Left Bank (1927), Tigers Are Better-Looking (1968) and Sleep It Off, Lady (1976).
This collection allows the reader to become familiar with the complete range of Mansfield's work from the early, satirical stories set in Bavaria, through the luminous recollections of her childhood in New Zealand, and through the mature, deeply felt stories of her last years.
Affairs, obsessions, ardours, fantasy, myth, legend and dream, fear, pity and violence - this magnificant collection of stories illuminates all corners of the human experience. Previously published in three volumes - "May We Borrow Your Husband?," "A Sense of Reality" and "Twenty-One Stories" - these thirty-seven stories reveal Graham Greene in a range of contrasting moods, sometimes cynical and witty, sometimes searching and philosophical. Each one confirms V.S. Pritchett's statement that Greene is 'a master of storytelling'.
'Shirley Hazzard is, purely and simply, one of the greatest writers working in the English today' Michael Cunningham. Now at last comes the first complete book of her short stories, including those previously uncollected. Collected Stories includes both volumes of National Book Award-winning author Shirley Hazzard's short story collections - Cliffs of Fall and People in Glass Houses - alongside uncollected works and two previously unpublished stories. Twenty-eight works of short fiction in all, Shirley Hazzard's Collected Stories is a work of staggering breadth and talent. Taken together, Hazzard's short stories are masterworks in telescoping focus, 'at once surgical and symphonic' (New Yorker), ranging from quotidian struggles between beauty and pragmatism to satirical sendups of international bureaucracy, from the Italian countryside to suburban Connecticut. In an interview, Hazzard once said, 'The idea that somebody has expressed something, in a supreme way, that it can be expressed; this is, I think, an enormous feature of literature'. Her stories themselves are a supreme evocation of writing at its very best: probing, uncompromising and deeply felt.
