The Collected Short Stories

Description

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 cafes; 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).

Jean Rhys was born in Dominica in 1894. After arriving in England aged sixteen, she became a chorus girl and drifted between different jobs before moving to Paris, where she started to write in the late 1920s. She published a story collection and four novels, after which she disappeared from view and lived reclusively for many years. In 1966 she made a sensational comeback with her masterpiece, Wide Sargasso Sea, written in difficult circumstances over a long period. Rhys died in 1979.

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 *