Product Description

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #169188 in Books
• Published on: 2002-05-03
• Original language: English
• Dimensions: .93" h x 5.45" w x 8.44" l, .98 pounds
• Binding: Paperback
• 496 pages

From Amazon.com
Although nobody would describe the unflinching stories of Richard Yates as beach reading, a sunny day and a soothing breeze may provide the best possible antidote to the author's trademark gloom. But even if you open the book in the dead of winter, don't expect to put it down, for Yates will draw you in despite yourself. Like the English novelist Anita Brookner--or, more to the point, like his protégé Raymond Carver--he is attracted to small lives. And like a diviner, he seeks out and locates precisely those moments when this smallness is sensed by his characters.

The protagonist of "The Canal," for example, spent most of World War II behind a desk, serving on the European front only during the final months of the conflict. At a postwar cocktail party, however, Miller and his wife encounter a former military officer, and the two begin to exchange stories. It turns out that the officer was decorated for valor in the very same battle that occasioned a major dressing-down for Miller. "I'll put it this way," he was told by his exasperated superior. "You give me more goddamn trouble than all the rest of the men in this squad put together. You're more goddamn trouble than you're worth. You got an answer for that?" Obviously he didn't--and still doesn't.

In an introduction to the 27 stories collected here, Richard Russo celebrates Yates's influence as a teacher at the Iowa Writer's Workshop. Any reader of Raymond Carver, to take just one conspicuous example, will recognize the atmosphere of lonely despair, coupled with small ambitions, that he absorbed from his mentor. It's a fascinating study in literary ancestry, and offers yet another reason to pick up this essential and long-overdue volume. --Regina Marler

From Publishers Weekly
Bitterness, loneliness and lack of fulfillment are the central themes of this grim posthumous collection. Yates (1926-1992) was the consummate writer's writer; his fiction influenced a generation of young admirers, including Andre Dubus and Richard Ford, but he has yet to achieve the name recognition of many of his disciples. This collection of 27 stories, seven previously unpublished, but most reprints from two long-out-of-print collections issued in 1962 and 1981, may change that. Yates is a gifted storyteller, particularly skilled at making emotional pain and sadness starkly real as his characters manage to live below even their own meager expectations. Compulsive failure Walter Henderson, the protagonist of "A Glutton for Punishment," plans his life as a series of expected defeats. In "The Canal" two veterans play at macho one-upmanship with phony war stories as their wives snicker with disdain. "A Clinical Romance" tells of the bickering and despair of men confined to a tuberculosis ward in a gloomy Virginia hospital. "Evening on the Cte d'Azur" is an achingly sad tale of lonely navy wives with too much time on their hands and too little self-esteem. Pitch-perfect in their gloomy detachment, these stories about the fractured relationships of lovers, friends, parents and children, and husbands and wives ring all too true. Yates's powerful dialogue and narrative make it entirely clear that no matter what, people are going to be only as happy as they have already made up their minds to be. (May 3)Forecast: A heartfelt introduction by Richard Russo expresses just how much Yates once meant to younger writers. If reviews make the stories' appeal similarly plain to today's readers, the collection should do well; in any case, it will remain a strong backlist title for years to come.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
Yates, who died in 1992, was never commercially successful, but his work was highly respected by other writers. This book includes stories from his collections Eleven Kinds of Loneliness and Liars in Love, as well as nine other stories, seven of which have not been previously published. Autobiographical threads are found throughout: young soldiers in the waning days of World War II, tuberculosis patients, struggling writers, alcoholism. Despite the general pessimism of the stories, they never seem contrived or self-indulgent. The earlier stories' economy gives way to a relatively formless later style, which presents more character development and subtext than is found in many novels. Recommended for all academic and larger public libraries. Christine DeZelar-Tiedman, Univ. of Minnesota Libs., Minneapolis
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.