Selected Stories

by John O'Hara

John O’Hara is widely credited with inventing the New Yorker short story, and remains the most-published short story writer in the history of the magazine. Selected from his vast collection of short fiction written over forty years, these refreshingly frank, sparely written stories show him at his best. Exposing a world of bartenders and 'b-girls', car washers and criminals, O'Hara dissects the subtleties that bind humans together and the pressures that separate them.

Genres: Short Stories, Fiction, American

240 pages, Paperback

First published July 1, 2011

About the author

American writer John Henry O'Hara contributed short stories to the New Yorker and wrote novels, such as BUtterfield 8 (1935) and Ten North Frederick (1955).

Best-selling works of John Henry O'Hara include Appointment in Samarra . People particularly knew him for an uncannily accurate ear for dialogue. O'Hara, a keen observer of social status and class differences, wrote frequently about the socially ambitious.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_O&#...

Reviews

[Myles · Rating 3 out of 5]

(3.4/5.0) Pretty damn unappreciated.

[Kezia Cole · Rating 2 out of 5]

Some of these - such as In the Morning Sun, A Phase of Life, The Ideal Man, and The Doctor's Son - are absolutely wonderful stories: perfectly polished brief studies of character and experience that, while very much of their time, also reach far beyond it. In the Morning Sun is my stand-out favourite from the whole collection by far; a raw and aching story that never gives way to mawkishness.

Unfortunately, the majority of the selection also comprises a great deal of filler, stories that never shift beyond the tiniest of vignettes and which never strike at any central truth of experience that hasn't already been mined in the better written entries. O'Hara's prose is engaging and frequently note-perfect, especially in the capturing of voice, tone, and emotional frustration, but his rendering of the same character tropes over and over is uneven, with several stories feeling like shallow retreads of better versions.

[John Rossington · Rating 4 out of 5]

These stories are an excellent introduction to this author. He is a great chronicler of the lives of American folk. He writes of both young and old, rich and poor, urban and rural, well educated and the illiterate. Unlike nearly all his contemporary writers he occasionally features black men and women in his stories.

[Steve Vinton · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wonderful stories. A touch of Joyce here, a touch of Hemingway and Chekov there, but ultimately the full force of O'Hara's genius illuminating the broken dreams of ordinary American people in the 1930's and 1940's.

[Chidambaram · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting perceptions