Short Stories: Five Decades

by Irwin Shaw

Overview

Featuring sixty-three stories spanning five decades, this superb collection-including "Girls in Their Summer Dresses," "Sailor Off the Bremen," and "The Eighty-Yard Run"-clearly illustrates why Shaw is considered one of America's finest short-story writers.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780226751283
Publisher:	University of Chicago Press
Publication date:	12/01/2000
Series:	Phoenix Fiction
Edition description:	1
Pages:	784
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.70(d)

About the Author

Irwin Shaw (1913-1984) grew up in New York City and graduated from Brooklyn College in 1934. He is the playwright of Bury the Dead, and the author of twelve novels, among them Rich Man, Poor Man, The Troubled Air, Nightwork, Acceptable Losses, Evening in Byzantium and Short Stories: Five Decades, the last published by the University of Chicago Press.

Table of Contents

Introduction
The Eight-Yard Run
Borough of Cemeteries
Main Currents of American Thought
Second Mortgage
Sailor off the Bremen
Strawberry Ice Cream Soda
Welcome to the City
The Girls in Their Summer Dresses
Search Through the Streets of the City
The Monument
I Stand by Dempsey
God on Friday Night
Return to Kansas City
Triumph of Justice
No Jury Would Convict
The Lament of Madame Rechevsky
The Deputy Sheriff
Stop Pushing, Rocky
"March, March on Down the Field"
Free Conscience, Void of Offence
Weep in Years to Come
The City Was in Total Darkness
Night, Birth and Opinion
Preach on the Dusty Roads
Hamlets of the World
Medal from Jerusalem
Walking Wounded
Night in Algiers
Gunners' Passage
Retreat
Act of Faith
The Man with One Arm
The Passion of Lance Corporal Hawkins
The Dry Rock
Noises in the City
The Indian in Depth of Night
Material Witness
Little Henry Irving
The House of Pain
A Year to Learn the Language
The Greek General
The Green Nude
The Climate of Insomnia
Goldilocks at Graveside
Mixed Doubles
A Wicked Story
Age of Reason
Peter Two
The Sunny Banks of the River Lethe
The Man Who Married a French Wife
Voyage Out, Voyage Home
Tip on a Dead Jockey
The Inhabitants of Venus
In the French Style
Then We Were Three
God Was Here But He Left Early
Love on a Dark Street
Small Saturday
Pattern of Love
Whispers in Bedlam
Where All Things Wise and Fair Descend
Full Many a Flower
Circle of Light

Editorial Reviews

[Shaw has] a primitive skill possessed by very few sophisticated men. . . . He asks only that we sit quietly in the cave, and build the fire high to frighten the wild animals outside. And just listen.
—( New York Times Book Review)

William Goldman

So artless and matter-of-fact is Irwin Shaw's technique that his stories seem to come off by accident. . . . At his best, which he's at an absurd number of times, Shaw is as skilled in construction as anyone who ever wrote in this form. . . . His stories move and inform and, God forbid, they entertain.
—( Esquire )

Bruce Jay Friedman

Irwin Shaw, formidably prolific in novels and plays as well, is another whose greatest mastery may lie in the briefer form. Short Stories: Five Decades presents sixty-three of his tales, in tone and subject matter more variegated than Cheever's.
—( Wall Street Journal )

Edmund Fuller