Eleven Kinds of Loneliness

Nov 13, 2024 9:30 AM

Author:Richard Yates

First published in 1962, a year after Revolutionary Road, this sublime collection of stories seems even more powerful today. Out of the lives of Manhattan office workers, a cab driver seeking immortality, frustrated would-be novelists, suburban men and their yearning, neglected women, Richard Yates creates a haunting mosaic of the 1950s, the era when the American dream was finally coming true - and just beginning to ring a little hollow.

Reviews

The most perceptive author of the twentieth century

—— The Times

Yates is a realist par excellence, the natural heir to Hemingway's pared-to-the-bones style and the antecedent of Carver's flat minimalism. There is something else though: a kind of transparency, almost a translucency, that owes more to Fitzgerald, his great literary hero... Read and weep

—— Kate Atkinson , Guardian

Yates created what is almost the New York equivalent of Dubliners

—— New York Times

Eloquent and powerful... Wryly funny even when he's quietly tearing your heart out

—— Harper's

Extravagantly gifted... Yates' eye and ear are unsurpassed; I know of no writer whose senses are in more admirable condition. It is they that make his characters live, make these stories move and beat - they, and the sure perfection of his writing

—— Esquire

The stories are sharply focused, beautifully written and powerfully moving. I know of no collection like it. Deservedly it has become a classic

—— Ann Beattie

Yates is a master of the form

—— Sebastian Faulks

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