| Selected Stories (Oxford World's Classics) | 
 enlarge | Author: Katherine Mansfield
Creator: Angela Smith
Publisher: OUP Oxford
Category: Book
List Price: £6.99
Buy New: £3.25
You Save: £3.74 (54%)
New (6) Used (9) from £0.01
Avg. Customer Rating:  5 reviews
Sales Rank: 41108
Media: Paperback
Edition: New edition
Pages: 438
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.6
Dimensions (in): 7.7 x 5 x 0.9
ISBN: 0192839861
Dewey Decimal Number: 813
EAN: 9780192839862
ASIN: 0192839861
Publication Date: February 21, 2002
Availability: Usually dispatched within 1-2 business days
|
| Similar Items:
|
| Customer Reviews:
 Intriguing and beautiful November 16, 2007
1 out of 2 found this review helpful
I am new to Mansfield's work (shameful, I know) and was pleasantly surprised by how much I enjoyed her short stories. The selection in this book is broad and vary in length, subject and even style. Mansfield's prose is created with pained consideration to every word - the characters and atmosphere are developed within a short timeframe and hence every word counts for much. Her stories are what I would call 'easy reads' (i.e. not complex sentences or crammed with unusual words) but there is certainly more to each story than meets the eye. They are thought-provoking and it is just as relevant to consider what is NOT said than what is. It would be impossible - and it certainly wouldn't do justice - to summarise Mansfield's stories in this review. The beauty is in the individual interpretation of her work as well as the lingering pleasure derived from every sentence.
I bought this as part of a literature course I was studying but, unlike some of the texts, I'll keep this gem on my bookshelf for future reading pleasure.
 Rich, subtle and humanistic October 29, 2007
8 out of 8 found this review helpful
K Mansfield is an author that I really love and admire. I studied her writings at university, and rediscovered her "Selected Stories" recently with great pleasure and awe. Her style is fantastic ; her short stories focus on the characters' inner states and her depiction of human psychology is so accurate, rich and subtle. My favourites stories are Bliss, Prelude, At the Bay, the Garden Party, Mr and Mrs Dove,... The poignant "Life of Ma Parker" as well as the human cruelty depicted in "Ms Brill" will make your heart bleed. An author highly recommended.
highly recommended February 4, 2007
5 out of 5 found this review helpful
Katherine Mansfield's quietly devastating prose and absolute commitment to craft remain two of the most potent twentieth century contributions to the difficult genre of the short story. This well-chosen selection demonstrates why.
Rich in colour, atmosphere and poetry, these tales most frequently turn on questions of loss and self-realization. Mansfield often takes as her subjects the resonant emptiness of lives framed by the tightest of parameters - a lonely woman's complete attachment and identification with her canary, a man's dependence on the memory of his dead son - and times where cherished certainties fall away in moments of revelation.
Perhaps the most famous of the latter type is 'Bliss' where the abrupt emptying of juvenile hostess Bertha Mason's boundless, yet ultimately restricting, exhiliration comes as an ambiguous opportunity for both delayed misery and growth. Elsewhere, tiny phrases in conversation unravel inescapable disparities in relationships; the complex emotional tensions of Mansfield's characters lie, as in Chekhov, primarily beneath the glittering surface of her clipped and confident style.
Intricately crafted, the nuanced dimensions of these stories haunt the reader, echoing in your mind long after you've put the book down. I find them compulsively re-readable.
This selection contains all of Mansfield's most famous tales including 'Bliss', 'The Canary', 'The Fly', 'The Daughters of the Late Colonel', 'A Dill Pickle', 'A Cup of Tea' and a recently available, unedited version of 'Je Ne Parle Pas Francais' which restores the full depth of its narrator's deliciously depraved senses of self and sensuality. A must-read.
Good September 20, 2001
2 out of 5 found this review helpful
I enjoyed her style, her vocabulary and such plot lines as in the two strangers with an odd childish relationship in "Something childish but very natural" and one woman's journey into an occupied area of France in "An indiscreet Journey."Very enjoyable and thoroughly satisfying!!
Elegantly crafted stories which capture the imagination September 19, 2001
11 out of 12 found this review helpful
With her abundant usage of simile and metaphor, her sensibility and her presentation of the senses, colour, shape and aesthetic and moral perception, the indescribable style of Katherine Mansfield is present within this collection of short stories. Taken from Bliss (1920), The Garden Party (1922), The Dove's Nest (1923) and Something Childish (1924), these stories are set in many places and at many times, being linked together by Mansfield's delight in beauty and the essence of life, and her slight disgust at the crude and the ugly. Mansfield's ability to create such acute pictures within the reader's mind, to veritably sweep the reader into the narrative with her descriptive language, can only be achieved through her masterful skill of crafting language. This collection is wonderful - if you have ever felt slightly disconnected from the world around you, that you have thoughts which others do not, then this collection is for you - relish the similies, melt into the metaphors and let Mansfield take you on her magic carpet ride.
|
|
|
