The only hardcover edition of Roald Dahl’s stories for adults, the Collected Stories amply showcases his singular gifts as a fabulist and a born storyteller. Later known for his immortal children’s books, including Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, James and the Giant Peach, and The BFG, Dahl also had a genius for adult short fiction, which he wrote throughout his life. Sep 01, 2012 The Complete Short Stories of Roald Dahl in the second of two unsettling and sinister volumes. 'Dahl finds the child in the adult and the adult in the child and, with a little smile, he sticks the knife in both' Anthony Horowitz, from his introduction Roald Dahl is one of the world's most popular.
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Preview — Collected Stories by Roald Dahl
Later known for his immortal children’s books, including Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, James and the Giant Peach, and The BFG, Dahlalso had a genius for adult short fiction, which he wrote throughout his life. Wh...more
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Dahl is a marvelous storyteller--simply brilliant!--but I sometimes wonder if I would enjoy his adult short stories as much if I hadn't first loved his children's books as a young girl. (This--which is probably true for most of us--is actually a reversed order. Dahl began his writing career with these short stories, and most of his children's clas...more
Only This :)
Katina :/
Beware of the Dog :)
They Shall Not Grow Old :(
Someone Like You :(
Death of an Old Man :/
Madame Rosette :)
A Piece of Cake :(
Yesterday Was Beautiful :(
Nunc Dimittis :)
Skin :)
Man from the South :)
The Soldier :(
The Sound Machine :/
Mr. Botibol :)
Vengeance is Mine Inc. :)
The Wish :)
Poison :)
Taste :)
Dip in the Pool :/
The Great Automatic Grammatizator :)
Claud's Dog: The Ratcatcher :(
Claud's Dog: Rummins :(
Claud's Dog: Mr. Hoddy :(
Claud's Dog: Mr. Feasey :(
My Lady L...more
As a kid I always really struggled to get into them, I found them very dry and forced myself to finish one of them. Which was why I was a bit hesitant about this collec...more
He has an uncanny ability to draw the reader into a story, leaving the discovery of the ending, whether humorous, horrifying or just strange unrevealed until the very end.
This book contains I short story I remember reading over 40 years ago in an old collection of stories published under the Alfred Hitchcock collection of strange stories that I've never forgotten,...more
Roald Dahl furthered my understanding as to the writerly shape of story.
I enjoyed recognizing how much of Dahl's biography is present within so many of these stories. You don't need to be a Dahl fan to enjoy this collection. You just need to be a fan of a good story.
From a reader's point of view, I'd probably give this 4/5. But when I combine my writer's brain reaction and my reader's brain reaction I have no choice but to score this 5/5
The darkness that is evident in some of his work for kids, who can forget the fate of some of the greedy protagonists in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory?, is witnessed in its full glory here.
That the collection begins with a man being tricked into a confrontation that will see him slain by a python gives you an idea of what is to follo...more
Should be enjoyed by anyone that likes, for example, Saki, or John Collier (Fancies and Goodngihts).
The war stories at the beginning were not my favorite but once he found his voice it is easy to track many of these stories to the children's tales he became famous for.
Highly recommended!
It took me quite a while to read as there are a lot of pages - it's the longest book I have ever read - and so my mind drifted from the book once or twice when I was super busy. The book is rather compact, and ea...more
To buy.
Most of these are fairly dated...but the dark humor is timeless. Almost as timeless as this review.
Almost.
Dahl's first published work, inspired by a meeting with C. S. Forester, was Shot Down Over Libya. Today the story is published as A Piece of Cake. The story, about his wartime adv...more
Once upon a time a small orphan was packed off to live with his aunts. They were a sadistic pair, these sisters, and rather than console and nurture they abused and enslaved him, bullying, beating and half-starving him. But he got his revenge, literally crushing them as he finally escaped, bound for adventure and a better life. It doesn’t sound much like the set-up of a bestselling children’s book, but what if I told you that the boy’s getaway vehicle was a gargantuan fuzzy-skinned fruit?
James and the Giant Peach sprang from bedtime stories Roald Dahl told his daughters. He’d already seen modest success with his short stories for adults, twisted tales with grisly punch lines, which were published in magazines such as the New Yorker and Playboy. This was his first work for children but it left plenty of adult readers deeply disturbed. Though the book appeared in the US in 1961, Dahl had to wait until 1967 before a British publisher would risk it, and even then, he had to agree to stump up half the costs himself – a savvy-seeming move when the book later became a bestseller.
James and the Giant Peach has been lambasted for its racism, profanity and sexual innuendo
He followed it with more than 15 other books for children, stories bursting with gluttony and flatulence, in which wives feed their husbands worms and the young are eaten by giants and changed into mice by bald, toeless hags. Villains loom large; as mean as they are ignorant, they tower over pint-sized protagonists, twirling them around by their pigtails or banishing them to places like ‘the Chokey’, Miss Trunchbull’s nail-studded punishment cupboard.
Today, titles like Fantastic Mr Fox, The BFG and Matilda, which was released just two years before his death, aged 74, in 1990, regularly appear on lists of the most popular kids’ books ever. All told, his work has sold more than 200 million copies worldwide. The controversy has never gone away though. In the decades since its publication, James and the Giant Peach has been lambasted for its racism (remember that bit where the Grasshopper declares “I’d rather be fried alive and eaten by a Mexican”?), profanity (‘ass’ appears at least three times), references to drugs and drink (all that snuff and whiskey), and sexual innuendo (a scene in which a spider licks her lips got readers in Wisconsin hot under the collar), not to mention its alleged promotion of disobedience and – wait for it – communism.
Chocolate and witches
It’s easy to poke fun at such prissy parental responses but take a closer look at Dahl’s writing for children, and you’ll find something to offend almost everyone. If he was a bigot, he was an equal-opportunities bigot. Teachers tend to be villainous, and even when benign, fail to impart any real wisdom. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory’s Oompa Loompas were originally depicted as small black pygmies with warlike cries. Female characters tend to be either warm or wicked with nothing in between, while Revolting Rhymes brands Cinderella, that fairytale girl-next-door, “a dirty slut”.
Maria Nikolajeva, professor of children's literature at the University of Cambridge, disputes the notion that there is any darkness in Dahl’s books for younger readers. “He is one of the most colourful and light-hearted children's writers”, she insists. But for all the funniness and dazzling linguistic acrobatics of his prose, she acknowledges that there are problems with his vision. Consider Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.
“Wonka is vegetarian and only eats healthy food, but he seduces children with sweets. It's highly immoral”, she says. And then there’s The Witches, whose child narrator, having been turned into a mouse, decides against returning to his human form because he dreads outliving his beloved grandmother. He’d rather die with her, as his abbreviated rodent lifespan will guarantee. “This is a denial of growing up and mortality, but mortality is one of the aspects that makes us human”, Nikolajeva points out. “To tell young readers that you can escape growing up by dying is dubious – drawn to the utmost an encouragement of suicide – and therefore both an ideological and an aesthetic flaw”.
Dahl knew what his readership liked: the kind of filthsome, frightsome fare that makes kiddles squirm
Yet there’s no denying that Dahl knew just what his juvenile readership liked: chocolate and witches and – to borrow some Gobblefunk, the language he invented for his Big Friendly Giant – the kind of filthsome, frightsome fare that makes kiddles squirm with gleeful revulsion. “Children love disgusting stories”, Nikolajeva says. The revolting serves “an important cognitive-affective function: we know it's disgusting, and the knowledge makes us superior. It's healthy. But it must be disgusting in combination with humour. Because extreme violence is not healthy. But Dahl is never violent, not even with naughty children in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.”
‘Roald the Rotten’
Darkness, for want of a better word, has forever been a secret – and not so secret – ingredient in children’s literature, whether it’s tales by the Brothers Grimm and Heinrich Hoffmann, or Lord of the Flies and The Hunger Games. If you’ve ever paid attention to the words of a nursery rhyme like Ring a Ring o’ Roses or Oranges and Lemons, you’ll know that suckling babes are reared on it – and with good reason. As child psychologist Bruno Bettelheim explained in his seminal study, The Uses of Enchantment, the macabre in children’s literature serves an important cathartic function. “Without such fantasies, the child fails to get to know his monster better, nor is he given suggestions as to how he may gain mastery over it. As a result, the child remains helpless with his worst anxieties – much more so than if he had been told fairy tales which give these anxieties form and body and also show ways to overcome these monsters,” he wrote.
It’s not hard to see where Dahl might have drawn his own darkness from. Having lost his older sister and father when he was three years old, he was packed off to boarding school aged just nine. The first volume of his memoirs, Boy, recalls in great detail the headmaster’s penchant for floggings so vicious they drew blood.
As a young RAF pilot in World War Two, Dahl came close to dying. Invalided out after crash landing in the Western Desert, he spent the rest of the war in the US, seducing heiresses and wealthy widows in the name of counterintelligence. His first marriage, to the actress and celebrated beauty Patricia Neal, had far from a storybook ending. The couple lost their eldest daughter to illness, and their only son was left brain damaged by a traffic accident. A few years later, Neal herself suffered a series of strokes.
To write brilliantly for children, an author must retain an element of the childlike – sometimes, that blurs into childishness
It was Neal who coined the nickname ‘Roald the Rotten’, referring to a mean, dyspeptic streak of which she saw plenty. He cheated on her, and the years-long affair that would eventually end their marriage was with a friend of hers. He could be a thoroughly unpleasant man outside the home, too. Despite his towering success, he was chippy about being a children’s author. And he made no attempt to hide his anti-Semitism. In 1983, he announced in the New Statesman that Hitler had his reasons for exterminating six million men, women and children. “There is a trait in the Jewish character that does provoke animosity”, he said. “I mean, there’s always a reason why anti-anything crops up anywhere; even a stinker like Hitler didn’t just pick on them for no reason.”
Read enough along these lines (there’s plenty more out there) and the sprightly horror of Dahl’s narratives no longer slips down quite so easily. Should we let this ruin his writing for us? Nikolajeva is unequivocal: “Frankly, I don't care about writers as real people”, she says. “If Dahl had been a sweet, benevolent storyteller would he have survived at all? Who wants sweet, benevolent stories?”
There was undoubtedly an element of provocation in much of his nastiness, both on and off the page. As the lives of the likes of Lewis Carroll, Margaret Wise Brown, and CS Lewis illustrate, to write brilliantly for children, an author must retain an element of the childlike. Sometimes, that blurs into childishness. To quote Dahl himself, the children’s author “must like simple tricks and jokes and riddles and other childish things”.
But it’s also worth recalling this: though childlike has come to refer to positive qualities associated with children, at its most basic, it simply means resembling a child. And as the magnificent Maurice Sendak observed, “In plain terms, a child is a complicated creature who can drive you crazy. There's a cruelty to childhood, there's an anger.” If Dahl’s books contain just one message for us adults, it’s the reminder that a child’s world isn’t all sweetness and light, it contains shadows too – extravagant, scary, wickedly entertaining ones.
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