Eleven Kinds of Loneliness

Description

A mesmerising collection of stories from the superb 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.

Richard Yates was born in 1926 in New York and lived in California. His prize-winning stories began to appear in 1953 and his first novel, Revolutionary Road, was nominated for the National Book Award in 1961. He is the author of eight other works, including the novels A Good School, The Easter Parade, and Disturbing the Peace, and two collections of short stories, Eleven Kinds of Loneliness and Liars in Love. He died in 1992.

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 *