Collected Short Stories of Roald Dahl [Paperback]

Roald Dahl (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 1, 2000

(Book Jacket Status: Jacketed)

The only hardcover edition of Roald Dahl s stories for adults, the Collected Stories amply showcases his singular gifts as a fabulist and a born storyteller.

Later known for his immortal children s books, including Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, James and the Giant Peach, and The BFG, Dahl also had a genius for adult short fiction, which he wrote throughout his life. Whether fictionalizing his dramatic exploits as a Royal Air Force pilot during World War II or concocting the ingeniously plotted fables that were dramatized on television as Tales of the Unexpected, Dahl was brilliant at provoking in his readers the overwhelming desire to know what happens next and at satisfying that desire in ways that feel both surprising and inevitable.

Filled with devilish plot twists, his tales display a tantalizing blend of macabre humor and the absurdly grotesque. From The Landlady, about an unusual boardinghouse that features a small but very permanent clientele, to Pig, a brutally funny look at vegetarianism, to Man from the South, in which a fanatical gambler does his betting with hammer, nails, and a butcher s knife, Dahl s creations amuse and shock us in equal measure, gleefully reminding us of what might lurk beneath the surface of the ordinary.

Editorial Reviews

Review

With the inventive power of a Thomas Edison and the imagination of a Lewis Carroll . . . Roald Dahl is a wizard of comedy and the grotesque, an artist with a marvelously topsy-turvy sense of the ridiculous in life. --Cleveland Plain Dealer

Dahl has the mastery of plot and characters possessed by great writers of the past, along with a wildness and wryness of his own. One of his trademarks is writing beautifully about the ugly, even the horrible. --Chicago Daily News

An ingenious imagination, a fascination with odd and ordinary detail . . . are the first strengths of Dahl s storytelling. --New York Times Book Review

About the Author

Roald Dahl (1916-1990) was born in Llandaff, South Wales, and went to Repton School in England. His parents were Norwegian, so holidays were spent in Norway. As he explains in Boy, he turned down the idea of university in favor of a job that would take him to 'a wonderful faraway place'. In 1933 he joined the Shell Company, which sent him to Mombasa in East Africa. When World War II began in 1939 he became a fighter pilot and in 1942 was made assistant air attaché in Washington, where he started to write short stories. His first major success as a writer for children was in 1964. Thereafter his children's books brought him increasing popularity, and when he died children mourned the world over, particularly in Britain where he had lived for many years.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 762 pages
• Publisher: Penguin Books (January 1, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0140158073
• ISBN-13: 978-0140158076
• Product Dimensions: 5 x 7.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (33 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #264,135 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Roald Dahl (1916-1990) was born in Llandaff, South Wales, and went to Repton School in England. His parents were Norwegian, so holidays were spent in Norway. As he explains in Boy, he turned down the idea of university in favor of a job that would take him to"a wonderful faraway place. In 1933 he joined the Shell Company, which sent him to Mombasa in East Africa. When World War II began in 1939 he became a fighter pilot and in 1942 was made assistant air attaché in Washington, where he started to write short stories. His first major success as a writer for children was in 1964. Thereafter his children's books brought him increasing popularity, and when he died children mourned the world over, particularly in Britain where he had lived for many years.The BFG is dedicated to the memory of Roald Dahls eldest daughter, Olivia, who died from measles when she was seven - the same age at which his sister had died (fron appendicitis) over forty years before. Quentin Blake, the first Children's Laureate of the United Kingdom, has illustrated most of Roald Dahl's children's books.

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

100 of 105 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Macabre Humor !! March 11, 2002

By HBeano

Format:Paperback

A most interesting collection of reading material by the Master of the twist-in-the-tale. Fifty-two entertaining stories full of black humor with unpredictable endings. The stories of "Over to You" are all about RAF fighters in WWII and at first I found them a bit boring compared to his other writings but after a while they grew on me too. For those who would like to know what stories this omnibus includes, here's a list:

Kiss,Kiss: The Landlady,William and Mary,The Way up to Heaven,Parson's Pleasure,Mrs.Bixby and the Colonel's Coat,Royal Jelly,Georgy Porgy,Genesis and Catastrophe,Edward the Conqueror,Pig and Champion of the World.

Over to You: Death of and Old Man,An African Story,A Piece of Cake,Madame Rosette,Katina,Yesterday was Beautiful,They Shall not Grow Old,Beware of the Dog,Only This and Someone like You.

Switch Bitch:The Visitor,The Great Switcheroo,The Last Act,and Bitch.

Someone Like You:Taste,Lamb to the Slaughter,Man from the South,The Soldier,My LadyLove My Dove,Dip in the Pool,Galloping Foxley,Skin,Poison, The Wish,Neck,The Sound Machine,Nunc Dimittis,The Great Automatic Grammatizator,Claud's Dog,The Ratcatcher,Rummins,Mr Hoddy and Mr Feasey.

And eight stories from
Tales of the Unexpected:
The Umbrella Man,Mr.Botibol,Vengeance is Mine Inc.,The Butler,Ah Sweet Mystery of Life, the Bookseller,The Hitchhiker and the Surgeon....

18 of 18 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars A superb collection of Roald Dahl's stories October 22, 2000

By Rachael Evans

Format:Paperback

This book is packed solid with 52 highly entertaining stories that have so many twists and turns you will not want to stop reading. Each well-written story is unique in its own way, whether it be amusing, thrilling, sad or altogether intriguing. The characters, even the dislikable ones, are so splendidly created and lifelike that you will be completely engrossed in their lives. This is a thoroughly enjoyable read for those who love a good twist-in-the-tale story.

13 of 13 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars Tales of the Unexpected September 8, 2006

By J C E Hitchcock

Format:Paperback

Roald Dahl is today best known as a children's writer. Books like "James and the Giant Peach" and "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory" were part of my childhood when I was growing up in the sixties, just as they were part of the childhoods of many people of my generation. From what I understand, he is even more popular with modern children. This book, however, presents us with the other side of Dahl's work, his stories for adults which are perhaps less well known today, although they did go though a spell of popularity in the seventies and eighties when they formed the basis of the Anglia Television series "Tales of the Unexpected".

Writers are often advised to write about the things they know best from personal experience, but unless he was lucky enough to enjoy a far greater variety of experiences than most other people, Dahl appears to have ignored this advice. Strangely, perhaps the part of this volume that I enjoyed least was the most personal, his first collection of stories "Over to You" which was based upon his wartime experiences in the RAF. Although deeply heartfelt, these generally lacked the wit and energy of his later work.

Dahl's other collections, "Someone Like You", "Kiss Kiss" and "Switch Bitch", and the uncollected stories published here as "Eight Further Tales of the Unexpected" contain a much greater variety of subject-matter, and suggest that the author was very knowledgeable about many different subjects- wine-tasting, the game of bridge, the art world, greyhound racing and the antiques business, to name only a few. As the title of the television series suggests, a feature of many of his stories is a sudden, unexpected twist at the end, a device which has been successfully used by many other short-story writers, perhaps most famously by O. Henry.

A frequent Dahl theme is that of the person who concocts an elaborate and supposedly foolproof scheme to achieve some disreputable end, only to be thwarted by events. A bookseller sends out invoices for pornographic books supposedly purchased by their late husbands to grieving widows. An antique dealer poses as a clergyman in order to acquire valuable furniture at knock-down prices. An unfaithful wife pretends to have found a pawn ticket in order to conceal from her husband the fact that her lover has given her a mink coat. In each case an unexpected turn of events brings about their downfall. Of course, in some cases the twist- as in "The Umbrella Man"- is that the villain succeeds in his scheme.

Sometimes the twist is less important than what has preceded it. In "Galloping Foxley", for example, a middle-aged commuter believes that the man sitting opposite him is the bully who made his life miserable at school. The twist- that he has, in fact, misidentified the man- is not particularly startling- what makes this story memorable is Dahl's description of the man's schooldays and his experiences of vicious schoolboy sadism. Not all the stories succeed; I felt that at times Dahl gave too much rein to his appetite for the bizarre and gruesome, with the result that some stories such as "William and Mary" or "Pig" tended to descend out of the real world and into a sort of grotesque Grand Guignol. Nevertheless, for every story that fails there are several that succeed. And when one of Dahl's stories succeeds, the result can be a delight. Among my favourites are "Lamb to the Slaughter", in which a woman who has killed her husband finds a neat way of disposing of the evidence, "Taste" which features the ultimate wine snob, "The Great Switcheroo" with its curious wife-swapping session and "The Surgeon" in which a stolen diamond is returned to its rightful owner by a most curious route. I suspect that most readers will find as much to enjoy in this collection as I did.