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The Collected Stories
A master of short fiction, Evan Connell's stories go right to the heart of the American character. Collected here are 56 stories gathered from his writing career, some heartbreaking and some comic. "A finely wrought study of human nature, masterfully blending its flaws and virtues."--Seattle Times.
675 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1995
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About the author
Evan S. Connell
64 books156 followersEvan Shelby Connell Jr. (August 17, 1924 – January 10, 2013) was a U.S. novelist, poet, and short-story writer. His writing covered a variety of genres, although he published most frequently in fiction.
In 2009, Connell was nominated for the Man Booker International Prize, for lifetime achievement. On April 23, 2010, he was awarded a Los Angeles Times Book Prize: the Robert Kirsch Award, for "a living author with a substantial connection to the American West, whose contribution to American letters deserves special recognition."
Connell was born in Kansas City, Missouri, the only son of Evan S. Connell, Sr. (1890–1974), a physician, and Ruth Elton Connell. He had a sister Barbara (Mrs. Matthew Zimmermann) to whom he dedicated his novel Mrs. Bridge (1959). He graduated from Southwest High School in Kansas City in 1941. He started undergraduate work at Dartmouth College but joined the Navy in 1943 and became a pilot. After the end of World War II, he graduated from the University of Kansas in 1947, with a B.A. in English. He studied creative writing at Columbia University in New York and Stanford University in California. He never married, and lived and worked in Sausalito, California for decades.
(Wikipedia)
In 2009, Connell was nominated for the Man Booker International Prize, for lifetime achievement. On April 23, 2010, he was awarded a Los Angeles Times Book Prize: the Robert Kirsch Award, for "a living author with a substantial connection to the American West, whose contribution to American letters deserves special recognition."
Connell was born in Kansas City, Missouri, the only son of Evan S. Connell, Sr. (1890–1974), a physician, and Ruth Elton Connell. He had a sister Barbara (Mrs. Matthew Zimmermann) to whom he dedicated his novel Mrs. Bridge (1959). He graduated from Southwest High School in Kansas City in 1941. He started undergraduate work at Dartmouth College but joined the Navy in 1943 and became a pilot. After the end of World War II, he graduated from the University of Kansas in 1947, with a B.A. in English. He studied creative writing at Columbia University in New York and Stanford University in California. He never married, and lived and worked in Sausalito, California for decades.
(Wikipedia)
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
May 15, 2020
It may deserve a full five stars but I was in a particular-- finicky, even-- short story mood when I decided to finish it. I wanted brisk bracing SHORT ness, but many of these stories were developed at considerable length, almost novelettes.
Even as I wasn't able to match their stamina, I loved the ones I loved and heartily recommend no matter what short story mood you're in. "The Anatomy Lesson" was gorgeous and philosophical about art and beauty. "The Cuban Missile Crisis" describes the advertising materials for a home bomb shelter in detail: a neat historical/cultural presentation. In "St. Augustine's Pigeon" a moody aging man's extended imaginings of the exact sort of young woman he needs to have for a mistress fascinated me.
I would say that many of the stories are Cheeveresque, being about hapless men and constricted women in angsty suburbs. And I love Cheever. The style that carries all of these pages along is definitely five-star. As an example I'll offer just one brief simile that I can't forget: "a face as pinched and stormy as a captured bat."
Wow.
Even as I wasn't able to match their stamina, I loved the ones I loved and heartily recommend no matter what short story mood you're in. "The Anatomy Lesson" was gorgeous and philosophical about art and beauty. "The Cuban Missile Crisis" describes the advertising materials for a home bomb shelter in detail: a neat historical/cultural presentation. In "St. Augustine's Pigeon" a moody aging man's extended imaginings of the exact sort of young woman he needs to have for a mistress fascinated me.
I would say that many of the stories are Cheeveresque, being about hapless men and constricted women in angsty suburbs. And I love Cheever. The style that carries all of these pages along is definitely five-star. As an example I'll offer just one brief simile that I can't forget: "a face as pinched and stormy as a captured bat."
Wow.
November 25, 2012
I used to think I didn't like short stories. Then one day I realized I do like them. I just don't like them as much as novels.
These are pretty good. I like that some of them were interconnected.
These are pretty good. I like that some of them were interconnected.
May 2, 2022
I took up THE COLLECTED STORIES OF EVAN S. CONNELL because of my abiding admiration for his novels MRS. BRIDGE and MR. BRIDGE.To say that I was disappointed would be an understatement: I was occasionally appalled.
In the first story in the collection, a little boy and his sister imagine that a fierce wind is caused by a ghost: “It is a terrible sound, and upon hearing it Otto shivers so deliciously that his little sister must also shiver.” That delicious sort of detail is far from the limited, repetitive range of Connell’s concern and attention in story after story as the collection continues.
To be sure, Connell knows how to pull a reader in, but he too often fails to deliver. You reach the end of a story and find yourself saying “What?”
Readers who are not as cold as Connell are likely to have trouble with the distance he maintains from his sometimes near-cardboard characters, particularly when some of them who were tiresome enough on first encounter show up again in later stories — as with insurance worker Karl Muhbach, playboys Leon and Bébert, and frustrated author William Koemer.
The first of the Leon and Bébert stories brings Ring Lardner to mind, except that Lardner would have cut the story by half and made the dialogue sharper.
You do have to give a chuckle of concurrence to some of Muhbach’s mordant observations, as when in “Otto and the Magi” we get this: “Times change. Language deteriorates. The absence of culture becomes a culture.”
Some of the earliest stories, such as his 1949 “Filbert’s Wife,” seem embarrassingly like overwritten and derivative undergraduate work. Others such as “Death and the Wife of John Henry” come off as experiments that didn’t pan out and should have ended up in the wastebasket.
Despite the shortcomings, it has to be said that Connell’s descriptive powers at their best are nearly unlimited, as in “The Yellow Raft” — three pages of sustained description that makes fully engaging reading, marred only by a rather strained simile near the end.
Here’s the finely etched way “The Fisherman from Chihuahua” opens:
“Santa Cruz is at the top of Monterrey Bay., which is about a hundred miles below San Francisco, and in the winter there are not many people in Santa Cruz. The boardwalk concessions are shuttered except for one counter-and-booth restaurant, the Ferris-wheel seats are hooded with olive green canvas and the powerhouse padlocked, and the rococo doors of the carousel are boarded over and if one peers through a knothole into its gloom the horses which buck and plunge through summer prosperity seem like animals touched by a magic wand that they may never move again. Dust dims the gilt of their saddles and sifts through cracks into their bold nostrils. About the only sounds to be heard around the waterfront in Santa Cruz during winter are the voices of Italian fishermen hidden by mist as they work against the long pier, and the slap of waves against the pilings of the cement dance pavilion when tide runs high, or the squawk of a gull, or once in a long time bootsteps on the slippery boards as some person comes quite alone and usually slowly to the edge of the gray and fogbound ocean.”
Perhaps the problem with the collection is simply that Connell is too limited a writer to hold up through 675 pages. A judicious smaller selection of his stories might be assembled and be well worth a reader’s time. I would want that volume to include “Mrs. Proctor Bemis” and “The Walls of Avila.”
In the first story in the collection, a little boy and his sister imagine that a fierce wind is caused by a ghost: “It is a terrible sound, and upon hearing it Otto shivers so deliciously that his little sister must also shiver.” That delicious sort of detail is far from the limited, repetitive range of Connell’s concern and attention in story after story as the collection continues.
To be sure, Connell knows how to pull a reader in, but he too often fails to deliver. You reach the end of a story and find yourself saying “What?”
Readers who are not as cold as Connell are likely to have trouble with the distance he maintains from his sometimes near-cardboard characters, particularly when some of them who were tiresome enough on first encounter show up again in later stories — as with insurance worker Karl Muhbach, playboys Leon and Bébert, and frustrated author William Koemer.
The first of the Leon and Bébert stories brings Ring Lardner to mind, except that Lardner would have cut the story by half and made the dialogue sharper.
You do have to give a chuckle of concurrence to some of Muhbach’s mordant observations, as when in “Otto and the Magi” we get this: “Times change. Language deteriorates. The absence of culture becomes a culture.”
Some of the earliest stories, such as his 1949 “Filbert’s Wife,” seem embarrassingly like overwritten and derivative undergraduate work. Others such as “Death and the Wife of John Henry” come off as experiments that didn’t pan out and should have ended up in the wastebasket.
Despite the shortcomings, it has to be said that Connell’s descriptive powers at their best are nearly unlimited, as in “The Yellow Raft” — three pages of sustained description that makes fully engaging reading, marred only by a rather strained simile near the end.
Here’s the finely etched way “The Fisherman from Chihuahua” opens:
“Santa Cruz is at the top of Monterrey Bay., which is about a hundred miles below San Francisco, and in the winter there are not many people in Santa Cruz. The boardwalk concessions are shuttered except for one counter-and-booth restaurant, the Ferris-wheel seats are hooded with olive green canvas and the powerhouse padlocked, and the rococo doors of the carousel are boarded over and if one peers through a knothole into its gloom the horses which buck and plunge through summer prosperity seem like animals touched by a magic wand that they may never move again. Dust dims the gilt of their saddles and sifts through cracks into their bold nostrils. About the only sounds to be heard around the waterfront in Santa Cruz during winter are the voices of Italian fishermen hidden by mist as they work against the long pier, and the slap of waves against the pilings of the cement dance pavilion when tide runs high, or the squawk of a gull, or once in a long time bootsteps on the slippery boards as some person comes quite alone and usually slowly to the edge of the gray and fogbound ocean.”
Perhaps the problem with the collection is simply that Connell is too limited a writer to hold up through 675 pages. A judicious smaller selection of his stories might be assembled and be well worth a reader’s time. I would want that volume to include “Mrs. Proctor Bemis” and “The Walls of Avila.”
April 7, 2019
A very uneven mix of short stories that is ultimately disappointing. The first one impressed me so much I would give it five stars, but thereafter the quality varies widely, with quite a few I would give one or two stars.
March 14, 2018
It felt good to finally get through the collection after starting and dipping in over the last decade. These stories feel of a definite time and place that has telescoped in the last few years.
July 15, 2014
I don't always love Connell, but it's churlish or perhaps unfair to criticize the oeuvre of an author whose work really deserves a wider audience - certainly those who cherish the tough, hard, domestic stories of Cheever, Carver, etc should give this story collection a look. Connell is an elegant stylist with a knack for quiet, understated pathos. I dont think this edition is in print, but you can find it at a good used store.
October 23, 2020
Reading this book is a master class in the art of short story writing. It is the perfect nightstand book that you can dip in before going to sleep. The topics cover a huge range of characters and situations. If you don't like a story, skip over a few pages to the next one. There is much beauty to be found in this book.
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews