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The Collected Short Stories
The Collected Short Stories
Oct 31, 2024 5:23 AM

Author:Jean Rhys

The Collected Short Stories

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).

Reviews

Includes some of the best British short stories of the last century ... You hear her voice speaking directly to you; her reality is your reality

—— Guardian

The force of her stories lies in the fusion of elegant prose with an uncanny penetration into the darker reaches of the soul

—— Washington Post

She is the novelist of longing and yearning and rage and sexual desire ... One of the twentieth-century greats

—— Linda Grant

This book fully exhibits Rhys's extraordinary talent for prose

—— Independent

Marra creates an unnerving story of a world, then and now, dominated by untouchable authorities that operate at every social level... a writer of intelligence, wit and sensitivity, adept at telling stories that entertain but also create the sensation that they are not so strange as fiction

—— George Berridge , Times Literary Supplement

A work of extraordinary confidence and empathy... a distinctive and heady fictional cocktail... thoroughly entertaining

—— Liam Hess , Literary Review

Marra’s sharp prose is alternatively ironic and poetic, giving a sympathetic voice to the most dispossessed characters…A memorable book on memory and how we try to remember’

—— Stephen Coulson , Lady

A very Russian nostalgia and sense of narrative resonate in this story of memories and how we remember, that runs from Stalin's purges to modern war-ravaged Chechnya. The lives of sympathetically voiced criminals, mercenaries, lovers and artists are interwoven in precisely crafted plotlines

—— Lady, Book of the Year

Addictive

—— Michelle Dean , Guardian

A superbly artful collection

—— BBC Culture

Remarkable... Marra is a gifted writer with the energy and the ambition to explore the lives of characters whose experiences and whose psyches might seem, until we read his work, so distant from our own. Reading his work is like watching the restoration — the reappearance, on the page — of those whom history has erased

—— Washington Post

Audacious... brilliant... ambitious and fearless

—— New York Times Book Review

Each story is a gem… almost unbearably moving

—— New York Times

Seamlessly narrated, with flashes of dark humour

—— International New York Times

Marra’s Russia is marked by both interconnection and darkly comic irony... the book’s brilliance and humor are laced with the somber feeling that the country is allergic to evolution... A powerful and melancholy vision of a nation with long memories and relentless turmoil

—— Kirkus
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