The Collected Short Stories: Jean Rhys (Penguin Modern Classics) - Softcover

Rhys, Jean

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0141984856 ISBN 13: 9780141984858

Publisher: Penguin Classics, 2017

Synopsis

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).

About this title

Review:

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)

From the Back Cover:

'The abyss. Despair. All those things.'

With an Introduction by Diana Athill

Bringing together all of Jean Rhys's short stories, this collection contains some of her most dazzling and devastating writing. Here are seedy hotels and bars in bohemian Paris, ruinous love affairs, Caribbean childhoods, ex-chorus girls in London bedsits, old ladies in drunken, genteel poverty; always outsiders, always close to the edge. Told with painful clarity and sharp humour, they cover the whole of her writing life, including all of her collections The Left Bank, Tigers Are Better-Looking and Sleep It Off, Lady as well as three additional stories.

'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

About this edition

• Publisher: Penguin Classics
• Publication date: 2017
• ISBN 10: 0141984856
• ISBN 13: 9780141984858
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 400