The Collected Stories - Softcover

Theroux, Paul

3.9

228 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0140246517 ISBN 13: 9780140246513

Publisher: Penguin, 1998

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A volume of stories, featuring: "Sinning With Annie"; "World's End"; "The Consul's File"; and "The London Embassy". The author's canvas stretches from London to South-East Asia, Boston to Paris and Africa to Eastern Europe, and the characters include colonials, children and students.

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From Booklist:

Theroux is nothing if not prolific. His travel books are some of the world's most popular, while his novels, including most recently Kowloon Tong , both please and provoke. And all the time he's been working on his 20-odd books, Theroux has been writing short stories, high-strung tales of intriguing psychological and cultural complexity that reflect his long sojourn in England and his extensive wanderings. This substantial collection of more than 60 compelling stories spans 25 years and represents, as Theroux confides in his edgy introduction, the essence of his "imaginative task as a writer." His stories are also, he declares, "better than me," a poignant conviction rooted in his perpetual loneliness, the force that propelled him to the many locales he so deftly conjures. Theroux's own preference for places where his work as a writer matters little in comparison to his skills as a traveler, hiker, or kayaker is echoed in the psyches of his characters, many of whom feel trapped in their lives, especially their marriages. As Theroux spins tales set in Africa, Boston, China, Corsica, England, India, Patagonia, and Prague, he examines differences in place and perspective, but finds, beneath it all, the same emotional skeleton, the same sense of alienation and melancholia. As flinty as the predicaments he renders are, they manage, under the right conditions, to give off sparks of bright humor and flares of love. Donna Seaman

From Kirkus Reviews:

The prolific Theroux (My Other Life, 1996, etc.) has published four volumes of short stories. This omnibus gathers all but two of the tales from Sinning with Annie (1972), The Consul's File (1977), World's End (1980), and The London Embassy (1983), and adds several previously uncollected stories. The collection forcefully demonstrates that Theroux, although he has written some unsettling and provocative novels, is often at his best as a writer of short fiction: His fascination with the ways in which a gesture or simple event can reveal the essentials of character, his shrewd eye for the rich resonance of seemingly modest events (especially when mutually uncomprehending Westerners and Africans and Asians collide), and his obvious pleasure in the constraints of a short story, the necessity for an economical use of language and incident, are all powerfully on display here. Tales like ``Clapham Junction,'' ``Sinning with Annie,'' ``Conspirators,'' and ``The Exile,'' among many others, are strong, unsettling, and unique. A varied, powerful, often moving collection, then, by one of our most original and ambitious authors. -- Copyright �1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

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