Collected Stories

by Alan Sillitoe

Gathers thirty-eight stories from each period of the author's career, including "The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner"

586 pages, Paperback

Published January 1, 1996

About the author

Alan Sillitoe was an English writer, one of the "Angry Young Men" of the 1950s (although he, in common with most of the other writers to whom the label was applied, had never welcomed it).
For more see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Sil...

Reviews

[TrumanCoyote · Rating 4 out of 5]

Earlier stuff much better...achieves a marvelous poignancy with things like "Uncle Ernest" and "The Fishing Boat Picture"--and "The Ragman's Daughter." Also great lines like: "It was a night full of star holes after a day of rain, a windy sky stretching into a huge flow over the rising ground of forest fields and Hyson Green....We made a solitary boat in this flood of small houses, packed together like the frozen teeth of sharp black waves...." But then increasingly he begins to get cumbersome and self-conscious and so we get awful things like "Mimic" and hokum like "Second Chance"--total garfunkels. The only stories I liked from the second half were "The Chiker" and "The Sniper"--and "Guzman" was interesting. But we begin to encounter all sorts of sentences like this one: "To question why one is alive means that one is only half a person, but to be a whole person is to be half dead." And: "Silence was freedom now that chaos had turned into order." Also the relentless downbeat Jack London bit began to pall, and seem a bit canned. Although he seems to have a bit more integrity and verity than just some slumming Joyce Carol Oates type, it's still dull--and not saying much if you're past your teenage angst years. Unfortunately the voice of "Long Distance Runner" devolved into mere Literature.

[Dominic Ciccodicola · Rating 4 out of 5]

On of the first real collections that I kept reading and re-reading. It includes Loneliness of a Long Distance Runner, but the real favorite of mine is The Fishing Boat Picture. The relationships are quite a bit what I love about kitchen sink writing and there are bits of language which I still use in my life weekly.

[Bettie · Rating 3 out of 5]

Philip Jackson reads stories by best-selling author Alan Sillitoe.

[Paul Pryce · Rating 3 out of 5]

I didn’t read every story - but the ones I did read remain very sharp.