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Rudyard Kipling Collected Short Stories

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Great Authors introduces readers to six of the world's premier authors and how they use language to create literary works of art. Each book presents a collection of the author's best short stories, a biography, and insightful notes about the stories.

104 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1915

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About the author

Rudyard Kipling

7,016 books3,643 followers
Joseph Rudyard Kipling was a journalist, short-story writer, poet, and novelist.

Kipling's works of fiction include The Jungle Book (1894), Kim (1901), and many short stories, including The Man Who Would Be King (1888). His poems include Mandalay (1890), Gunga Din (1890), The Gods of the Copybook Headings (1919), The White Man's Burden (1899), and If— (1910). He is regarded as a major innovator in the art of the short story; his children's books are classics of children's literature; and one critic described his work as exhibiting "a versatile and luminous narrative gift".

Kipling was one of the most popular writers in the United Kingdom, in both prose and verse, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Henry James said: "Kipling strikes me personally as the most complete man of genius (as distinct from fine intelligence) that I have ever known." In 1907, at the age of 41, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, making him the first English-language writer to receive the prize, and its youngest recipient to date. He was also sounded out for the British Poet Laureateship and on several occasions for a knighthood, both of which he declined.

Awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1907 "in consideration of the power of observation, originality of imagination, virility of ideas and remarkable talent for narration which characterize the creations of this world-famous author."

Kipling kept writing until the early 1930s, but at a slower pace and with much less success than before. On the night of 12 January 1936, Kipling suffered a haemorrhage in his small intestine. He underwent surgery, but died less than a week later on 18 January 1936 at the age of 70 of a perforated duodenal ulcer. Kipling's death had in fact previously been incorrectly announced in a magazine, to which he wrote, "I've just read that I am dead. Don't forget to delete me from your list of subscribers."

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Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
Profile Image for Lora Shouse.
Author 1 book31 followers
February 26, 2016
I spent approximately two years reading this. And now, apparently Amazon no longer carries it! This review may get a little long.

My original list of books to read had ‘Short Stories’ by Kipling on it. It didn’t say which ones. It also had something called Requiem by Kipling on it – a work I have yet to find. Having discovered by now that the sources of some of the recommendations for the earlier part of the list were a little wobbly (sometimes the name of the book or the author was misspelled – whether in the source or by me – sometimes only part of the title was included, etc.) I thought it possible that the Requiem referred to may have been either a short story or a poem. I have already discovered that some of the items on the list were actually short stories rather than full length books. So anyway, when I ran across this kindle collection of all of Kipling’s short stories, I jumped on it as it would allow me to mark off the ‘Short Stories’ entry and at a minimum insure that the Requiem entry did not refer to one of Kipling’s short stories. Apparently not. But there are still the poems (although I don’t think it is one of them either).

Anyway, on to the book itself.

The pros:
1. This is not a single book; it is 21 separate books comprising every volume of short stories Kipling ever published. If you are a rabid fan of Rudyard Kipling, or if you are a Rudyard Kipling scholar, this would be a plus, as you have everything right here in one kindle book.
2. It has interactive links in the table of contents. If you are focusing on one book at any particular time, you can go to the Table of Contents, click your book, and be taken to its Table of Contents. From there, you can click the title of any of the stories to go directly to the one you want. This didn’t help me that much, as I was reading straight through.
3. Included in this book are some of Kipling’s best and most famous books – Just So Stories, The Jungle Book, The Second Jungle Book, Puck of Pook’s Hill, Rewards and Fairies, and The Phantom Rickshaw and other Ghost Stories are all in here. There are also a number of books of soldier stories and several studies of English country life.
4. I was surprised at the range of types of story. For instance, there are a couple that would have been considered science fiction at the time, envisioning a time when trans-Atlantic travel by dirigible would be common. There are a handful of ghost stories. There are the animal stories. And there are some stories it would be hard to classify. About half of them are really good. Most of the rest are pretty good. There are several that would be easier to understand if you were familiar with the English colonial government of India or the British military. Many are gently tounge-in-cheek. None are overtly mean-spirited or abusive, although he reflects a few ideas that are no longer current.

The cons:
1. This is not a single book; it is 21 separate books comprising every volume of short stories Kipling ever published. This makes it lo-o-o-ong. The best of the stories are not hard to get through as individual stories, but some of those containing a lot of references to things that are no longer common or practices of the British military that nobody else knows about, especially a hundred years after the fact, can be a little difficult. Plus, with some of these, they lose the point.
2. Some of the stories appeared, and appear here, in more than one volume. I didn’t so much mind with ‘Rikki-tikki-tavi’, my all-time favorite Kipling story, which appears in The Jungle Book and again as a free-standing book of its own, but by the time ‘The Man Who Would Be King’ came up for the third time, I had to page through that one really fast. There were several other stories that I had to bypass on their second appearance too.
3. There were characters in many of these stories that Kipling didn’t introduce to any great extent. They just appeared on the scene as old friends of his and started in acting like themselves. Usually by the end of the story you knew as much about them as you needed to, or at least as much as anybody else evidently did, but in some instances it was confusing in the beginning. The three British privates, Mulvaney, Ortheris, and Learoyd, who appeared not only in several stories, but in a number of the different books, you get to know almost as well as Kipling apparently did, but this is not true of some of the others.

On the whole, I liked this book. It made the list for a reason. But there were definitely some parts that I liked more than others.
Profile Image for Michelle.
1,555 reviews11 followers
May 13, 2021
Not my favorite by this author.
Profile Image for Jim Robles.
436 reviews43 followers
November 13, 2015
I was unimpressed with "In the Matter of a Private" and "The Man Who Would be King." I am glad I kept reading: "The Courting of Dinah Shadd," "On Greenhow Hill," "Without Benefit of Clergy," "The Black Cat" (Guy stuff! Sports story! Chase scene!), "The Cat that Walked by Himself" (Cats!), Mary Postgate and The Gardner were excellent.

I must just be too far removed to appreciate "At The End Of The Passage," although it did get me part of the way from Durham to Seattle.

I would eschew presentism, but "The Finest Story in the World" is misogynistic.

Mary Postgate is one the best stories I have ever read on how we fail to see ourselves in the "other."

The ninety-third book I have finished this year, and the thirty-seventh, of seventy-eight titles, in Jan's Great Books Collection that I am sworn to read in retirement.

The Man Who Would Be King

p. 35. . . . they imagine that such mad fellows bring good fortune.

Brother Peachy Carnehan - p. 28, 31.

Brother Daniel Dravot (red beard) - p. 28, 31.

The Courting of Dinah Shadd

Privates Mulvaney, Ortheris, and Learoyd - p. 67.

Thomas Atkins - p. 69.

On Greenhow Hill

p. 115. And I've been forgettin' her ever since.

Without Benefit of Clergy

p. 127. Hardly knowing what he did, Holden cut twice as he muttered the Mahomedan prayer that runs: "Almighty! In place of this my son I offer life for life, blood for blood, head for head bone for bone, hair for hair, skin for skin."

p. 135. The delight of his life was too perfect to endure. Therefore it was taken away as many things are taken away in India -- suddenly and without warning.

p. 144. . . . the human soul is a very lonely thing and, when it is getting ready to go away, hides itself in a misty borderland where the living may not follow.

The Finest Story in the World

p. 190. . . . . nothing less than the story of a Greek galley slave, . . . .

Were there Greek galley slaves? Certainly not on Athenian war galleys.

p. 193. Then we closed up on the other ship, and all their fighting men jumped over our bulwarks, . . .

I cannot say it was never done, but the Greeks though slaves on fighting ships were impracticable.

p. 197. . . . when he looked for rowers - not slaves, but free men.

????????

p. 204. You are a Christian, and it is forbidden to eat, in your books, of the Tree of Life, or else you would never die.

p. 215. Charlie had tasted the love of woman that kills remembrance, and the finest story in the world would never be written.

That is misogynistic.

The Maltese Cat

This one is told from the perspective of horses in a polo match.

Wireless

p. 291. And, remember, we're only at the beginning. There's nothing we shan't be able to do in ten years.

Interesting? Wireless and ESP? There are more things . . . than our philosophies . . . .

They

A ghost story? It reminded me, a bit, of "The Others" (2001) with Nicole Kidman.

On the Great Wall

p.348. "Threatened men live long," . . .

Hadrian's Wall? and another ghost story?

Marklake Witches

p. 362. - but he really is a white wizard.

Mary Postgate

p. 382. . . . there came a war which, unlike all wars that Mary could remember, did not stay decently outside England and in the newspapers, but intruded on the lives of people whom she knew.

A Madonna of the Trenches

Another ghost story?

The Gardner
Profile Image for Joel Chapman.
14 reviews
August 14, 2007
I'm biased due to my being enamoured of anything Indian, but even so, this collection has some really choice pieces, literarily speaking.
Profile Image for Beth E.
442 reviews10 followers
June 13, 2016
Beautiful prose and a novel I feel I should have read much earlier in my life. So glad to have finally experienced some of the writing by Rudyard Kipling.
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews

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