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3.5 

Eleven Kinds of Loneliness

By Richard Yates
Eleven Kinds of Loneliness by Richard Yates digital book - Fable

Publisher Description

This classic story collection from the renowned author of Revolutionary Road presents eleven tales of Americans adrift in the mid-twentieth century.

First published in 1962, Eleven Kinds of Loneliness showcases the piercing eye for telling detail and profound insight into human turmoil that have become Richard Yates’s signature. The New York Times Book Review hailed it as “the New York equivalent of Dubliners.”

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.

In Eleven Kinds of Loneliness, you'll discover some of the most influential and sharply observed short fiction of the twentieth century, and find out why Richard Yates was a true American master.

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86 Reviews

3.5
Thumbs Up“God knows there certainly ought to be a window around here somewhere, for all of us. :)”
“I tried..got through one story, got me all depressed at the end, I couldn’t go on. If you have a strong character and heart this is for you. I usually enjoy dark themes but this one felt overwhelming for me. Perhaps I was not in the right head space while reading it, no hate against the book, the writing seemed quite good.”
“It is not often that you find a male author dealing so honestly with the subject of loneliness. It is rarer to find such vulnerability in a collection from the early 1960s, where more traditional (and possibly toxic) notions of masculinity in post-war America still hold sway. In these stories, Richard Yates takes an incisive look at marriages, friendships and families that are affected by unspoken resentments, dead-end jobs, or even wrecked by illness (in two stories about TB patients and their families). In all of them, Yates treats his characters with dignity and respect, even Walter Henderson, who has a penchant for self-pity to the point of relishing the grandeur of failure in “A Glutton for Punishment, and the deluded cab driver, Bernie Silver, who believes he has a wealth of stories in his experiences that he just needs a ghostwriter to bring to life in “Builders”. One wonders if Yates has included biographical content as the would-be-ghostwriter in this last story. The society Yates paints is unapologetically dark and divisive, with the downtrodden looking for others further down the social ladder to trod on. Even would-be-go-gooders like the kindly schoolteacher Miss Price in “Doctor Jack-o’-Lantern” cannot save her new charge from the brutal gaze and bullying of his classmates. They “could see at a glance that Vincent Sabella had nothing to do with skyscrapers” even if “the fact of someone’s coming from New York might have held a certain prestige, for to most children the city was an awesome, adult place that swallowed up their fathers every day”. Instead, what comes of her good intentions is more spite from these little terrors and resentment from Vincent himself. Although the setting of the stories is very much of the mid-20th century and therefore dated, there is a kind of understated beauty in its refined prose that is almost a lost art in much of today’s writing.”

About Richard Yates

Richard Yates is the author of the novels Revolutionary Road, A Special Providence, Disturbing the Peace, The Easter Parade, A Good School, Young Hearts Crying, and Cold Spring Harbor, as well as The Collected Short Stories of Richard Yates. His short story collection Liars in Love is also now available in eBook. He died in 1992.

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