Customer Reviews

Collected Stories (Everyman's Library)

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Kipling is little appreciated today, and that's a shame, because he was one of the finest short-story writers the world has ever produced. The closest word I can find to describe his stories is "hynotic." Such an imagination...many of the stories are understated horror and fantasy: stories of talking trains, of wild rides that end up in hellish worlds, of frighteningly realistic curses by man-beasts. Some are truly puzzling, such as "The Gardener." Some are obviously (and disturbingly) autobiographical ("Baa Baa Black Sheep"). Kipling strikes a note few writers can: his stories can be enjoyed (and enjoyed immensely) by both children and adults. These are the kinds of stories that children love having read to them. They always clamor for more.

The title is a lie: this is not even close to being Kipling's collected stories. It is a selection, and an excellent one. If you want all of Kipling's stories, you'll have to look elsewhere. If you want a good place to find the best of them, this is the book to have.

Kipling, to me, represents the closing chapter of the British Empire. All the great culture and adventure that Victorian England produced was then being slowly drawn back. Kipling's stories are earthy, human, and not easily understood these days.

His short stories are easily read in one sitting and so you can pick through to find something for that moment.
Much would not be considered politically correct, but that's what makes it great.

Very nicely bound handsome edition with wonderful stories. I cannot wait to dig in. I am 65 and have not read Kipling's stories for 40 years (college). My all time favorite book as a child was Rikki Tikki Tavi and from there I became a Kipling fan.

Ihave read one of the most deep tales, the title "the gardener". When i readed it came to my mind two words: fathe, hope, uncanny.

This tale awake in my a feeling, the atraction for the work of kipling,is magic, it surrounds your views with his views, his feelings with your feelings. All that happens is the presence of the author, this book, is not a simple book of tales, is the gate for a new worlds, a thousend of worlds, all with a new gravity and with brave life

I got this so that my husband could read stories to my 10-year-old granddaughter -- he loves to read, she loves to be read to. Kipling provides adventure and different cultures, so I figured it would entertain them both. I had not factored in how limited our vocabularies are today. My husband had to stop frequently to explain words; occasionally, he would have to look one up. They both still enjoyed the stories. (I also think it did my granddaughter good to learn that even grown ups have to look up words; there is no stigma to using a dictionary -- or in our case, the internet.)

I would recommend the book to anyone who wants their child to achieve a high score on the verbal SAT, but I think a child would be better off to have it read to him than to read it solo.

The book itself is large and heavy (hardback), but the print is a comfortable size.

There is no question that Kipling was an incredibly talented writer and this collection includes 40 of his best stories. The stories are evidently in chronological order, beginning with his tales of India and, as pointed out by another reviewer, they cover a wide range of subjects. The breadth of this collection really showcases Kipling's ability to write dialogue in the vernacular for characters as disparate as Indian tribesmen, Englishmen (and women) of various social classes and ages, and even a few ancient Romans.

This collection does, however, have its faults. The first is that the writing is very difficult to follow in some places. A few (brief) sections of dialogue are so obscure as to be unintelligible, at least to the modern reader. There are also (very occasionally) passages such as this one: "In the Mediterranean (Nile keeping always her name) there is but one river-that shifty-mouthed Danube, where she works through her deltas into the Black Sea.", which are needlessly opaque. The vast majority of the book is very lucid, but every so often I did find myself having to reread the last few lines to try to decipher what Kipling intended to convey.

The other thing that I did not particularly like were some of the stories that Kipling wrote later in his life (e.g. "The Gardener", "Mary Postgate", "The Wish House"). While these stories are often considered his best, I found them a bit on the gloomy side; his Indian tales were much more enjoyable to read. In my opinion, "The Gardener" is a meandering over-rated tale and the ending of "Mary Postgate" is annoyingly vague.

Most of the stories in this collection were enjoyable to read, and all are excellently written. I highly recommend it.