The Collected Stories of Richard Yates

'One of the greatest American novelists of the twentieth century' Sunday Telegraph

Yates was the most perceptive American writer of the twentieth century

A major literary event...a remarkable achievement

His short stories...are absolutely wonderful

Richard Yates was born in 1926 in New York and lived in California. His prize-winning stories began to appear in 1953 and his first novel, Revolutionary Road, was nominated for the National Book Award in 1961. He is the author of eight other works, including the novels A Good School, The Easter Parade, and Disturbing the Peace, and two collections of short stories, Eleven Kinds of Loneliness and Liars in Love. He died in 1992.

Richard Yates was acclaimed as one of the most powerful, compassionate and accomplished writers of America's post-war generation. Whether addressing the smothered desire of suburban housewives, the white-collar despair of Manhattan office workers or the heartbreak of a single mother with artistic pretensions, Yates ruthlessly examines the hopes and disappointments of ordinary people with empathy and humour.

Disturbing the Peace

'One of the greatest American novelists of the twentieth century' Sunday Telegraph

Richard Yates was born in 1926 in New York and lived in California. His prize-winning stories began to appear in 1953 and his first novel, Revolutionary Road, was nominated for the National Book Award in 1961. He is the author of eight other works, including the novels A Good School, The Easter Parade, and Disturbing the Peace, and two collections of short stories, Eleven Kinds of Loneliness and Liars in Love. He died in 1992.

John Wilder is in his mid-thirties, a successful salesman with a place in the country, an adoring wife and a ten-year-old son.But something is wrong. His family no longer interests him, his infidelities are leading him nowhere and he has begun to drink too much. Then one night, something inside John snaps and he calls his wife to tell her that he isn't coming home...

Liars in Love

A beautiful collection of Yates's most extraordinary short stories

Richard Yates is a writer of commanding gifts: an astonishing skill and robust intelligence. His prose is urbane yet sensitive, with passion and irony held deftly in balance.

Richard Yates stands today as America's finest realistic novelist

Yates is a realist par excellence. Read and weep

The most perceptive author of the twentieth century...A magnificent writer

One of the greatest American novelists of the twentieth century

Every good writer I know acknowledges Yates as a master

The stories in Liars in Love are concerned with troubled relations and the elusive nature of truth. Whether it be in the depiction of the complications of divorced families, grown-up daughters, estranged sisters, office friendships or fleeting love affairs, the pieces in this collection showcase Richard Yates's extraordinary gift for observation and his understanding of human frailty.

The Easter Parade

'The Easter Parade is the best modern novel I have read this year' Julian Barnes

Poignant tale… His tales are wonderfully gloomy and self-referential.

[The Easter Parade is] Richard Yates' best novel, which makes it wonderful. From the first sentence to the last...I loved the book

Few men since Flaubert have offered such sympathy to women whose lives are hell

One of the United States' finest post-war novelists and short-story writers.He wrote some of the best fiction of his generation; it continues to give pleasure to all those readers who are fortunate enough to discover it

As touching as it is real, as beautiful as it is sad. Like a softer, subtler, less salty Updike, Yates expounds a poignant, suburban American realism

A tour de force...an unflinching novel of rare power

That Yates manages to make the novel not only readable but also mesmerizing is testament to his powers as a storyteller... storytelling that is simultaneously easy to digest and hugely satisfying.

Even as little girls, Sarah and Emily are very different from each other. Emily looks up to her wiser and more stable older sister and is jealous of her relationship with their absent father, and later her seemingly golden marriage. The path she chooses for herself is less safe and conventional and her love affairs never really satisfy her. Although the bond between them endures, gradually the distance between the two women grows, until a tragic event throws their relationship into focus one last time.

Eleven Kinds of Loneliness

A mesmerising collection of stories from the superb Richard Yates

The most perceptive author of the twentieth century

Yates is a realist par excellence, the natural heir to Hemingway's pared-to-the-bones style and the antecedent of Carver's flat minimalism. There is something else though: a kind of transparency, almost a translucency, that owes more to Fitzgerald, his great literary hero... Read and weep

Yates created what is almost the New York equivalent of Dubliners

Eloquent and powerful... Wryly funny even when he's quietly tearing your heart out

Extravagantly gifted... Yates' eye and ear are unsurpassed; I know of no writer whose senses are in more admirable condition. It is they that make his characters live, make these stories move and beat - they, and the sure perfection of his writing

The stories are sharply focused, beautifully written and powerfully moving. I know of no collection like it. Deservedly it has become a classic

First published in 1962, a year after Revolutionary Road, this sublime collection of stories seems even more powerful today. Out of the lives of Manhattan office workers, a cab driver seeking immortality, frustrated would-be novelists, suburban men and their yearning, neglected women, Richard Yates creates a haunting mosaic of the 1950s, the era when the American dream was finally coming true - and just beginning to ring a little hollow.

A Special Providence

A moving, ironic and often heart breaking exploration of post-war America by the author of Revolutionary Road

So quotidian, so possible, so plausible, that it is more terrifying to read...than to read of the disasters and massacres of kings

Yates's trademark blackness does not seem out of place or excessive... the skilful sketches of Prentice's colleagues bring an element of humanity to a sordid and inhumane topic

Bobby is eighteen and lost on the battlefields of Europe, stumbling his way through World War II. He has turned out to be the heroic soldier he imagined and his experience of battle principally involves fear and confusion. Back home, his mother Alice puts all her hopes in her son, and dreams of his return and starting a new life for them both. 
 
Richard Yates's novel is both tender and ironic as he follows Bobby's adventures and disasters and reflects on the intense but complicated bond between mother and son.

Cold Spring Harbor

A brilliantly written exploration of youth and self-delusion by the author of Revolutionary Road

Yates writes with a sympathy so clear-hearted that it often feels like nostalgia for his own youth, and yet he is also thoroughly uncompromising in revealing their capacity for self-delusion, their bewilderment in the face of failure

So consistently well-written, just, unsentimental and sympathetic

Yates's prose is as elegant and minimalist as ever... He simply tells the story - in easily comprehensible but perfectly pitched language

Richard Yates was born in 1926 in New York and lived in California. His prize-winning stories began to appear in 1953 and his first novel, Revolutionary Road, was nominated for the National Book Award in 1961. He is the author of eight other works, including the novels A Good School, The Easter Parade, andDisturbing the Peace, and two collections of short stories, Eleven Kinds of Loneliness and Liars in Love. He died in 1992.

Evan Shepard is a young man with a chequered past when he first meets the Drakes, after his car breaks down outside their house. Behind him, he has a troubled adolescence, a failed marriage and a little daughter, but his meeting with the quiet and beautiful Rachel heralds a new start. However, after their swift marriage, things don't work out quite as planned and the stresses of living with Rachel's family, in their shared house in Cold Spring Harbor, begin to take their toll on the new couple.

Young Hearts Crying

In this moving novel, Richard Yates once again proves his skill as the chronicler of the 'American Dream' and all its casualties

Bad couples, sad, sour marriages, young hopes corroded by suburban life... These are bitterly perceptive books

Yates is a truthful and ruthless writer. He intends to spare his readers nothing

Young, newly married and intensely ambitious, Michael Davenport is trying to make a living as a writer. His adoring wife, Lucy, has a private fortune that he won't touch in case it compromises his art. She in turn is never quite certain of what is expected of her. All she knows is that everyone else seems, somehow, happier. 
 
In this magnificent novel, at once bitterly sad and achingly funny, Richard Yates again shows himself to be the supreme chronicler of the American Dream and its casualties.

A Good School

A bittersweet, haunting exploration of youth and the impact of war

Bittersweet, elegiac, this is Richard Yates's gentlest book

In an age embarrassed by story-telling... Yates tell stories we believe

William Grove is a nervous teenager trying to fit in at his new boarding school. Jack Draper is a teacher whose wife is cheating on him with one of his colleagues. Edith Stone is the daughter of the English master who falls in love with the most popular boy in school. Their stories twine together in the claustrophobic confines of the small community of Dorset Academy. And them comes Pearl Harbor and suddenly they are faced with larger issues than the day-to-day problems and politics of school life.

Revolutionary Road

Revolutionary Road is an American classic and has been made into an Oscar-nominated film starring Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio, released in 2009.

Here is more than fine writing; here is what, added to fine writing, makes a book come immediately, intensely and brilliantly alive...a masterpiece

The literary discovery of the year... It's as brilliantly nuanced as Updike's Rabbit sequence, and as sad as anything by Fitzgerald

I hand out copies of Revolutionary Road to anyone who will take them...one of the most moving and exact portraits of suburbia in all of American literature

The Great Gatsby of my time... One of the best books by a member of my generation

The best novel ever written about the death of the American dream

Hailed as a masterpiece from its first publication, Revolutionary Road is the story of Frank and April Wheeler, a bright young couple who are bored by the banalities of suburban life and long to be extraordinary. With heartbreaking compassion and clarity, Richard Yates shows how Frank and April's decision to change their lives for the better leads to betrayal and tragedy.

Richard Yates

Revolutionary Road: The literary discovery of the year... It's as brilliantly nuanced as Updike's Rabbit sequence, and as sad as anything by Fitzgerald

Revolutionary Road, The Easter Parade, Eleven Kinds of Loneliness

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Richard Yates

Praise for Revolutionary Road, The Easter Parade, Eleven Kinds of Loneliness

Revolutionary Road: The literary discovery of the year... It's as brilliantly nuanced as Updike's Rabbit sequence, and as sad as anything by Fitzgerald

Yates is a master

Books by Richard Yates

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