Collected Stories

by Dylan Thomas

This unique edition presents the complete span of Thomas's short stories, from his urgent hallucinatory visions of the dark forces beneath the surface of Welsh life to the inimitable comedy of his later autobiographical writings. With PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A YOUNG DOG and ADVENTURES IN THE SKIN TRADE, Thomas found a new voice for his irreverent memories of lust and bravado in south-west Wales and London, leading to a sequence of classic evocations of childhood magic and the follies of adult life.

Genres: Short Stories, Fiction, Poetry, Classics, Literature, Literary Fiction, Anthologies

372 pages, Paperback

First published June 1, 1983

About the author

Dylan Marlais Thomas (1914-1953) was a Welsh poet who wrote in English. Many regard him as one of the 20th century's most influential poets.

In addition to poetry, Thomas wrote short stories and scripts for film and radio, with the latter frequently performed by Thomas himself. His public readings, particularly in America, won him great acclaim; his booming, at times, ostentatious voice, with a subtle Welsh lilt, became almost as famous as his works. His best-known work includes the "play for voices" Under Milk Wood and the celebrated villanelle for his dying father, "Do not go gentle into that good night." Appreciative critics have also noted the superb craftsmanship and compression of poems such as "In my craft or sullen art" and the rhapsodic lyricism of Fern Hill.

Reviews

[Erik Akre · Rating 4 out of 5]

What a truly strange set of stories this is. They are like dreams, and as if written straight from the mind to the page. Even one who knows little of Welsh culture may feel a strange "Welshness" about these settings and these characters. Is it "Welshness," or is it some kind of phantasmagorical parallel world of imagined reality? The stories are frightening, humorous, and bizarre. It's as if Thomas attacked the page with his pen, storming down these odd plots and odd characters into a (sometimes barely, and sometimes hardly at all) coherent sequence.

The dialogue is infectious, once you can sink into a story and figure out how he's doing it. The stories roll along with much drinking and much creepiness. The language is violently attractive, much like his poems. And after you finish one, you wonder to yourself one or more of four things.

1. What the heck was that supposed to have meant?
2. What the heck was going on in that story?
3. What just happened to me?
4. How did that story satisfy me so well?

You finish a story with a sense of having travelled through someone else's strange mental world. It's worth a look for any lover of Thomas's poems, or any lover of poetry in general.

[Rupert Owen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Dylan’s short stories are awash with his memories of people and places, and as memories tend to be made up of the self same stuff of dreams, the characters and events drip with the excesses of the imagination. The latter collection in the book are taken from Adventures in the Skin Trade and Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog. They are classic Thomas such as Return Journey and A Child’s Christmas in Wales. The first twenty short stories present a strange array of tales that sometimes befuddled me, sometimes drowned me in a glut of imagery, and sometimes just lost me in the telling. Isolating and violent but with the humanist always shining through in the finer details of the character’s actions. A small sentence in the story Where Tawe Flows sums it up for me ... ‘Wait a bit! Wait a bit!’ said Mr Humphries, ‘Let’s get our realism straight. Mr Thomas will be making all the characters Blue Birds before we know where we are. One thing at a time. Has anyone got the history of the character ready?’. With well endowed eccentricities Dylan portrays the Welsh personality with sincere profundity, as assuredly described in A Visit to Grandpa’s where everyone in the town knows where Grandpa is going when dressed in his Sunday best.

These tales are oozing with the macabre, from madness to murder, malady and perversion. With a background as a journalist Dylan knew how to tumble the everyday into scandal of fantasy, with an overriding sadness for the longing of the past made present in the retelling of personal memories and observations. This made most apparent in Return Journey where perhaps the bombing of Swansea was in someway a metaphor in how our reveries of time gone by lay as remnants in our mind, so that we may only recall glimpses of what we experienced in our youth.

[Billy Jones · Rating 4 out of 5]

A volume which brings together Thomas's evocative reminiscences of childhood in the unabashedly autobiographical tales in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog and the decidedly surreal, sometimes magical realist earlier fictions. This is an assemblage of the gothic and kaleidoscopic and one of the surest demonstrations of Thomas's ability as a writer. The influence of Caradoc Evans's My People is most discernible and most welcome, but Thomas's own style and narrative voice cuts through in stunning fashion. 'The Holy Six', 'A Prospect of the Sea' and 'The Burning Baby' are among my favourites from the earlier short stories. These are tales which oscillate between exile and belonging, the macabre and childhood tenderness in worlds populated by a contorted folklore, occult mysticism, beggars, comedians and missing Grandfathers. A prose testament to the beast, angel and madman within the author.

[Mellie · Rating 5 out of 5]

I hadn't read any Dylan Thomas prior to this story collection, but I have to say that he has become one of my favorites. Some of his stories are a bit image-heavy and tough to muddle through, but I found that when this happened, a Manhattan or two helped clear things up a bit. :-)

My favorite stories have to be the ones in "Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog" and "After the Fair." Though many can be quite dark, most are short enough (two or three pages) to be finished quickly.

I've also heard that he was a huge inspiration to Bob Dylan. If you listen to Bob Dylan whilst reading these stories, it's quite obvious how the fiction writer has affected the songwriter. Both use quite a lot of the same multi-layered images and descriptions. Much of Thomas's prose flows similar to te lyrics of Bob Dylan's songs-most noticeably on the album "Blond on Blond."

I'm only sorry I borrowed this from the library; I'd love my own copy to mark up.

[Leif Erik · Rating 4 out of 5]

'A Prospect of the Sea' may well be one of the greatest short stories ever. I feel like a bit of a cheat as this isn't the collection I read but I couldn't find that one anywhere on here.

[Michael Arnold · Rating 1 out of 5]

It's a bit too 'clever' (pretentious) for me. I don't know, I don't think I'm really a fan of Dylan Thomas. Maybe one day I'll return to this book and find it amazing - but right now I just find it boring.

[Eddard Hordas · Rating 3 out of 5]

Thomas manera un estilo demasiado poético en sus relatos. Y para quienes no somos adeptos a la poesía, puede ser un obstáculo para disfrutarlos. Aun así hubo varios muy entretenidos y hasta graciosos.

[L]

I think I prefer his more surreal prose poems over the later stuff but there's a regional Gothic tinge that runs throughout I really appreciate - the sea is a character, the Jarvis hills are a character, I notice a running theme of an occult feminine in his landscapes.

[Amelia Davies · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Holiday Memory" is my favorite selection. A perfect slice of late summer.

[withdrawn · Rating 4 out of 5]

Read and loved decades ago.

[Glen · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a fascinating collection of stories. I would recommend beginning with the middle section devoted to the 10 stories published under the winning title Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog, which I found the most enjoyable part of the collection. As noted in the introduction by Leslie Norris, the stories owe less to the Joyce work evoked in jest in the title than to another work by the great Irish writer, Dubliners, for here Thomas turns his gifts for observation and word play to his own experience growing up in Wales, and the results are impressive. By turns humorous, bawdy, melancholy, and even shocking, these stories are the work of an artist in command of his vision and his craft. I would then advise the reader to skip the three stories published originally under the title Adventures in the Skin Trade and move to the following seven stories, which include the famous "A Child's Christmas in Wales," "Holiday Memory", and "Return Journey." From there one might return to the skin trade trilogy (which really seems to be one continuous narrative broken into three segments), move then to the four fragments and early stories that conclude the volume, and finish with a return to the beginning of the volume and the 20 stories that open it, which I found to be the most difficult part of the collection. These pieces are dream or nightmare-like, a kind of symbolic and allegorical phantasmagoria with only flitting and fleeting contact with the ground, like reading a poem by Mallarme or the lyrics to a Bob Dylan song of the Highway 61 Revisited or Blonde on Blonde period. The one notable exception to this characterization in that section of stories was "The Orchard", which I found to be more akin to Thomas' later work.

[Richard Thompson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Some of these stories are genius. When Mr. Thomas was at his best, he could deliver a potent brew. The hand of a poet is evident in the imagery, the vocabulary and the rhythms. This is particularly true of the stories that are more magical, mythic and metaphorical, like "The Orchards," which was my favorite of all in the collection. But even some of the more realistic ones, like "A Child's Christmas in Wales" have a strong poetic feel. And in the best stories, there is a care in construction that is worthy of Chekhov. I loved how "Who Do You Wish Was With Us?" moved from two friends on a country walk to two lazy friends hopping a bus to the beach to Ray's pain at the loss of his family, which was lurking all the time just under the surface. I also enjoyed the autobiographical stories of childhood, particularly "The Fight" where we see brawling profane boys who are the worst kind of rowdy children, but who are also talented in poetry and music. In that one I could feel the adult Dylan Thomas, obsessed with his poetic voice, driven to write great works, but at the same time a drinker and a fighter doomed to an early death. But there were other stories that didn't hold my attention. Some of them went on and on. And the endings were never entirely satisfying. I kept thinking that maybe his true genius could have blossomed if he had only had more self-control, but then I'd go the other way, convinced that it was his lack of self-control that enabled his greatness.

[Scott Pomfret · Rating 5 out of 5]

I rarely read a book twice, but Dylan Thomas' collected short stories demand it. Mottled with
myriad inversions and subversions and particulars, they are a mixed bag, but most are rich, chewy, and complex. Many narrate from the perspective of a child or adolescent, which gives them a fervent and wide-eyed imaginative bent. Among the best are the famously closely and acutely observed "Child’s Christmas in Wales" and a companion story in the same vein. But the most perfect of them is "The Tree," a threatening, multilevel, multi-perspective story of biblical and simple characters that leave the taste of impending cruelty. On the weaker side, are the impenetrable stories with unending sentences, clause piled on clause, and endless verbs made of nouns. Nevertheless, though the narrative is lost, the poet shines through. Here's a brief excerpt as an example of what I mean:

"There was a story once upon a time whispered in the water voice; it blew out the echo from the trees behind the beach in the golden hollows, scraped on the wood until the musical birds and beasts came jumping into sunshine. A raven flew by him, out of a window in the Flood to the blind, wind tower shaking in tomorrow’s anger like a scarecrow made out of weathers."

[Trevor Wilkes · Rating 4 out of 5]

Collected Stories by Dylan Thomas shows a vast difference between what he says, what he means and what he feels. There’s night and day difference between the styles he is capable of.

There’s the religious decadence of evil and unknown reeling horrors in stories like The Tree, After The Fair and The Burning Baby. The experimental prose offers an insight into a mind of dreamlike terrors that offer no explanation, able to flip a switch into coming of age stories, much like Joyce. Always important and innocently wholesome in the sense that it perfectly captures growing up and into the author he became. He displays this in stories such as A Child’s Christmas In Wales, The Followers, Who Do You Wish Was With Us and One Warm Saturday. They offer a connection to the reader that is explored through growing up and living beautifully and often times simply.

Beautiful, flowing and emotional, sometimes mysterious, empty and explorative but always interesting.

[Bryan Rainstein · Rating 2 out of 5]

Sorry, couldn’t get into it. Couldn’t understand most of it. A few stories were very sweet and funny but also few and far between. I’ll take the hit that I culturally missed every reference due to my being born so much later and farther away than him. I really loved the stories of his childhood, but there were only a few of those in the book. There is no doubting he was a great writer but this collection was all over the place and a slog to get through. I did make a break through while reading this though. In one do the stories the words matched up with the lyrics of that song Kiss Me by Sixpence None the Richer. Well I did my research and found that the writer of the song was reading a lot of Thomas at the time... but the story it is taken from is about a witches initiation and the ending of the ritual involves kissing the devil’s butt. Is the song Kiss Me about kissing the devil’s butt? If you ask me I say hell yeah it is. Thanks for your time.

[William · Rating 3 out of 5]

My rating is sort of meaningless because I struggled through the first half of the book, which consists mostly of (appropriately) unpublished stories. I kept putting the book aside to read other things, but am glad I returned to it. Starting with "Adventures in the Skin Trade," it is wonderful, evocative reading. "A Child's Christmas in Wales" is a legitimate classic. I heard an audio of Thomas reading it when I was in 9th grade, but had never revisited it. On the other hand, this goof reading was followed by an unexplained appendix of stories which left me cold.

Taken as a whole, the book does give an often intoxicating and wistful review of Thomas' upbringing. and thus of one's own. The language is musical, and often creative, and images really stay with you.
Do read this, but skip the early stories and get to the worthwhile part.

[Jonathan Natusch · Rating 1 out of 5]

I didn't finish this. Again.

I bought a copy years ago, on the strength of a couple of his poems I adored. I tried to read, and gave up. It sat there, glowering at me. I picked it up again, all these years later. Tried working my way through it.

I can't do it. Almost every story goes nowhere or is entirely impenetrable. Plot is continually forsaken for style, and, frankly, stylistically most of the stories have left me cold.

I've read some of the reviews on this site. They assure me that if I burst past the earlier portion of the book, it gets better. Unfortunately, I've struggled through so many terrible short stories, with no improvement, that I've lost the will to pick the book up again.

Maybe in another ten year or so I'll pick it up again and start halfway through. Until then, I'll stick to Dylan Thomas's poetry.

[Nicole · Rating 3 out of 5]

DT will write the most breathtaking passage that spans nature and the cosmos but really he’s just talking about shagging. Most of these stories were too lusty for me, and I am often more drawn to DT’s syntax than the holistic delivery and narrative of his stories (hence why I prefer his poetry). Regardless, this is a collection I can see myself returning to in various forms time and time again. His semi autobiographical tales about boyhood and village life are incredible. Some new favourites here: “The Peaches”, “Who do you wish was with us?” and “Quite early one morning” in particular. Impossible not to read them and feel these electric zips and heartaches and shimmers flow around your body. So interesting to think about their conception following his early Lynchian nightmares and how they then mature into the surrealism of Adventures in the Skin Trade. What a range. I can see DT’s room off Fulham Road so clearly: all that writing thrown together with “butter, eggs, mashed potatoes” for “yards.” What a fascinating guy.

[Shane Ha · Rating 4 out of 5]

Radiant stories about childhood and youth from this rebellious wordsmith. It is clear he loved Wales. All the pieces are set there and nostalgic. I liked how Thomas himself is a character in all the stories, and they demonstrate a high degree of self-awareness while also maintaining a distance from himself. The Thomas character is usually more of an awkward soul on the periphery, observing the action rather than initiating it. A sense of longing for a past he has remarkable memory of is apparent. Each story is filled with saturated harmonic sentences portraying a world Thomas left behind only physically. These stories made me want to visit Swansea to order a pint of bitter and rumble around the Welsh coastal countryside.

[Alec]

#31-33
Home and help were over. He had eight pounds ten and Lucille Harris’ address. Many people have begun worse, he said aloud. I am ignorant, lazy, dishonest, and sentimental; I have the pull over nobody.
---
Will I be alone tonight in the room with the piano? Samuel wondered. Alone like a man in a warehouse, lying on each bed in turn, opening cupboards and putting my hand in, lookig at myself in mirrors in the dark.
---
‘I am a friend of nobody’s. I am detached,’ he whispered into the buzzing receiver. ‘I am Lopo the outlaw, loping through the night, companion of owls and murderers. Tu wit to woo,’ he said aloud into the mouthpiece.

[Kyle Chen · Rating 4 out of 5]

The poignant language and vivid detail of The Collected Stories by Dylan Thomas are the very objects of everything I aspire to be as a writer. In particular, the short story "The End of the River" offers the reader a duality of storytelling where you can either watch the senile Sir Peregrine run to the end of the river, or you could attempt at understanding his madness.

I am still trying to understand why Sir Peregrine ran to the end of the river, or why Grandpa in "A Visit to Grandpa's" stands on a bridge. Nevertheless, that only adds to the fun of the story. My only wish is that I was cleverer to understand it better.

[Aabha Sharma · Rating 3 out of 5]

Weird stories. A few problems, culture, climate differences made relating difficult, along with deliberately confusing writing. But a few I loved, I mean the ones I got, I really got, and I felt like they were some of the best stories ever written(the visitor, the burning baby, the tree)Also quite dark themes, death, murder, incest, witchcraft.
Loved the Christmas story, nostalgic without being sappy. I think everyone loves that one. He’s a fearless writer, not very concerned with rules and quite poetic.

[Evan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really cool to see all the short stories that Thomas wrote and follow a sort of development of how he approaches the medium. He begins with, dark, atmospheric, gothic, tales of Wales and its inhabitants. Yet, we end up in his nostalgic, comic, innocent reminisces of childhood.
The stories are deeply Welsh, reproducing the landscapes and cityscapes of the country. These stories inhabit a space between taking-the-piss and profound respect. There is a recognition of the weird, and a thoughtful reverence, of the people and places in the stories. Existing in this middle ground I think is what makes his Welsh-ness and identity a part of the fiction. It also makes for some really good short stories.

[Brad Erickson · Rating 1 out of 5]

Too weird. Just couldn't finish. Continues a trend I've had this summer of reading abysmal short story collections, mostly by contemporary writers. Maybe I'll try his poems some day.

[William Dearth · Rating 4 out of 5]

Some of thees stories are hard to grasp. Others, like those in "The Portrait of the Artist as Young Dog", are brilliant.

[Sarah · Rating 3 out of 5]

writing style was five stars but lack of plot or characters meant it couldn’t really be more than 3

[Nick Reeves · Rating 4 out of 5]

near perfection.

[Elvis Gregory-sayce · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great Poetry

[Derrelicto · Rating 4 out of 5]

Puede ponerse demasiado místico a ratos, pero estuvo bastante bueno.

[Ermina · Rating 5 out of 5]

Mislim (znam) da nisam naišla na genijalnijeg pisca u žanru zvanom "sve".