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ゲイルズバーグの春を愛す
This collection of light fantastic stories will fill you with nostalgia for the older, gentler ways; and happily, it will assure you that some of those ways are still around.
Paperback Bunko
First published January 1, 1963
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About the author
Jack Finney
120 books482 followersMr. Finney specialized in thrillers and works of science fiction. Two of his novels, The Body Snatchers and Good Neighbor Sam became the basis of popular films, but it was Time and Again (1970) that won him a devoted following. The novel, about an advertising artist who travels back to the New York of the 1880s, quickly became a cult favorite, beloved especially by New Yorkers for its rich, painstakingly researched descriptions of life in the city more than a century ago.
Mr. Finney, whose original name was Walter Braden Finney, was born in Milwaukee and attended Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois. After moving to New York and working in the advertising industry, he began writing stories for popular magazines like Collier's, The Saturday Evening Post and McCall's.
His first novel, Five Against the House (1954), told the story of five college students who plot to rob a casino in Reno. A year later he published The Body Snatchers (later reissued as Invasion of the Body Snatchers), a chilling tale of aliens who emerge from pods in the guise of humans whom they have taken over. Many critics interpreted the insidious infiltration by aliens as a cold-war allegory that dramatized America's fear of a takeover by Communists. Mr. Finney maintained that the novel was nothing more than popular entertainment. The 1956 film Invasion of the Body Snatchers was remade twice.
Mr. Finney first showed an interest in time travel in the short-story collection The Third Level, which included stories about a commuter who discovers a train that runs between New York and the year 1894, and a man who rebuilds an old car and finds himself transported back to the 1920s.
He returned to the thriller genre in Assault on a Queen (1959) and tried his hand at comedy in Good Neighbor Sam (1963), a novel based on his experiences as an adman, played by Jack Lemmon in the film version.
In The Woodrow Wilson Dime (1968), Mr. Finney once again explored the possibilities of time travel. The dime of the title allows the novel's hero to enter a parallel world in which he achieves fame by composing the musicals of Oscar Hammerstein and inventing the zipper.
With Time and Again, Mr. Finney won the kind of critical praise and attention not normally accorded to genre fiction. Thomas Lask, reviewing the novel in The New York Times, described it, suggestively, as "a blend of science fiction, nostalgia, mystery and acid commentary on super-government and its helots." Its hero, Si Morley, is a frustrated advertising artist who jumps at the chance to take part in a secret project that promises to change his life. So it does. He travels back to New York in 1882, moves into the Dakota apartment building on Central Park West and experiences the fabulous ordinariness of a bygone age: its trolleys, horse-drawn carriages, elevated lines, and gaslights. This year Mr. Finney published a sequel to the novel, From Time to Time.
Mr. Finney also wrote Marion's Wall (1973), about a silent-film actress who, in an attempt to revive her film career, enters the body of a shy woman, and The Night People (1977). His other fictional works include The House of Numbers (1957) and the short-story collection I Love Galesburg in the Springtime (1963). He also wrote Forgotten News: The Crime of the Century and Other Lost Stories (1983) about sensational events of the 19th century.
Mr. Finney, whose original name was Walter Braden Finney, was born in Milwaukee and attended Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois. After moving to New York and working in the advertising industry, he began writing stories for popular magazines like Collier's, The Saturday Evening Post and McCall's.
His first novel, Five Against the House (1954), told the story of five college students who plot to rob a casino in Reno. A year later he published The Body Snatchers (later reissued as Invasion of the Body Snatchers), a chilling tale of aliens who emerge from pods in the guise of humans whom they have taken over. Many critics interpreted the insidious infiltration by aliens as a cold-war allegory that dramatized America's fear of a takeover by Communists. Mr. Finney maintained that the novel was nothing more than popular entertainment. The 1956 film Invasion of the Body Snatchers was remade twice.
Mr. Finney first showed an interest in time travel in the short-story collection The Third Level, which included stories about a commuter who discovers a train that runs between New York and the year 1894, and a man who rebuilds an old car and finds himself transported back to the 1920s.
He returned to the thriller genre in Assault on a Queen (1959) and tried his hand at comedy in Good Neighbor Sam (1963), a novel based on his experiences as an adman, played by Jack Lemmon in the film version.
In The Woodrow Wilson Dime (1968), Mr. Finney once again explored the possibilities of time travel. The dime of the title allows the novel's hero to enter a parallel world in which he achieves fame by composing the musicals of Oscar Hammerstein and inventing the zipper.
With Time and Again, Mr. Finney won the kind of critical praise and attention not normally accorded to genre fiction. Thomas Lask, reviewing the novel in The New York Times, described it, suggestively, as "a blend of science fiction, nostalgia, mystery and acid commentary on super-government and its helots." Its hero, Si Morley, is a frustrated advertising artist who jumps at the chance to take part in a secret project that promises to change his life. So it does. He travels back to New York in 1882, moves into the Dakota apartment building on Central Park West and experiences the fabulous ordinariness of a bygone age: its trolleys, horse-drawn carriages, elevated lines, and gaslights. This year Mr. Finney published a sequel to the novel, From Time to Time.
Mr. Finney also wrote Marion's Wall (1973), about a silent-film actress who, in an attempt to revive her film career, enters the body of a shy woman, and The Night People (1977). His other fictional works include The House of Numbers (1957) and the short-story collection I Love Galesburg in the Springtime (1963). He also wrote Forgotten News: The Crime of the Century and Other Lost Stories (1983) about sensational events of the 19th century.
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Displaying 1 - 16 of 16 reviews
September 29, 2018
Light and enjoyable, though clearly dated in many ways: a pair of magic glasses that lets the male wearer see through women's dresses so that they appear to be walking down the street in their underwear; women referred to as girls; and so on.
I particularly enjoyed the title story, "A Possible Candidate for the Presidency", "The Intrepid Aeronaut" and the final story, "The Love Letter".
A good collection for dipping into while travelling, or in between other books, rather than reading the stories one after the other.
I particularly enjoyed the title story, "A Possible Candidate for the Presidency", "The Intrepid Aeronaut" and the final story, "The Love Letter".
A good collection for dipping into while travelling, or in between other books, rather than reading the stories one after the other.
June 19, 2023
Another good one from Jack Finney. Some of the stories overlap here with his other short story collections but the ones new to me were very enjoyable.
April 2, 2011
There's a story in this quirky, nostalgic collection that's really stayed with me, though I must have read it 40 years ago. The hero, a married man who's living a life of quiet desperation in smalltown America, takes it into his head to build a hot air balloon in his back yard. He's handy with tools, and he gets it finished quickly. All the time, this tune is going through his head:
The balloon is really basic. There's just a bar hanging beneath it, a swing big enough for two people to sit on. He sits down on one side, and she sits down next to him. He releases the rope, and off they fly.
They can see their little town a couple of hundred meters beneath them. It's all completely soundless except for the hiss of the torch. The flight lasts half an hour or so, and then he manages to land them without incident. Maybe they kiss? I can't remember for sure, but I don't think so. And then she goes back into her house, and he packs up the balloon and never uses it again.
One evening, several years later, he meets her by accident at a party.
"Josephine..." he murmurs, and his wife looks at him in surprise.
"Isn't her name Marion?" she asks when the woman's moved on.
Come, Josephine, in my flying machine,It's night, and he's almost got it inflated when he sees the next door neighbor's wife staring at him from the other side of the fence. Evidently, she's having trouble believing what she's seeing and wonders if she's dreaming. And when he calls to her using the Josephine song, she comes docilely without saying a word.
And it's up! we'll go
Up! we'll go
The balloon is really basic. There's just a bar hanging beneath it, a swing big enough for two people to sit on. He sits down on one side, and she sits down next to him. He releases the rope, and off they fly.
They can see their little town a couple of hundred meters beneath them. It's all completely soundless except for the hiss of the torch. The flight lasts half an hour or so, and then he manages to land them without incident. Maybe they kiss? I can't remember for sure, but I don't think so. And then she goes back into her house, and he packs up the balloon and never uses it again.
One evening, several years later, he meets her by accident at a party.
"Josephine..." he murmurs, and his wife looks at him in surprise.
"Isn't her name Marion?" she asks when the woman's moved on.
January 27, 2014
Fans of Jack Finney {I am one} will find this an enjoyable collection of stories. It deals with the motifs that Finney clearly favours such as a nostalgic approach to the past, time-travel, and the presence of an unperceived magic in ordinary things. The collection was published originally in 1969 and there is certainly a dated quality to some of these tales—particularly in a stereotyped attitude to gender roles. But, by and large, the stories are gentle and pleasant.
The weakest story is “the Coin Collector”. Even here, there is an interesting method of playing with an alternate worlds theme, but I feel the story is spoiled by the sexual stereotyping and the plot holes. Finney tried a fix-up of the story in the short novel, "The Woodrow Wilson Dime", but was only partially successful. I feel that was the only failure in the anthology. Others, such as “The Intrepid Astronaut”, and “Prison Legend” take the ordinary and transmute it effectively into something very special.
In my opinion, the final story “The Love Letter” is the finest story in the book. Everything works perfectly here—the nostalgia, the evocative atmosphere, the meditative narration, the original time-slip device. And it has a beautiful ending. This was first published in 1959 and appeared in "The Saturday Evening Post". I have found it difficult to get. I do have it in a paperback anthology published by Scholastic in 1969: "11 Great Horror Stories". It certainly is not a horror story and I am glad to see the story finally available for Kindle in its original collection.
The weakest story is “the Coin Collector”. Even here, there is an interesting method of playing with an alternate worlds theme, but I feel the story is spoiled by the sexual stereotyping and the plot holes. Finney tried a fix-up of the story in the short novel, "The Woodrow Wilson Dime", but was only partially successful. I feel that was the only failure in the anthology. Others, such as “The Intrepid Astronaut”, and “Prison Legend” take the ordinary and transmute it effectively into something very special.
In my opinion, the final story “The Love Letter” is the finest story in the book. Everything works perfectly here—the nostalgia, the evocative atmosphere, the meditative narration, the original time-slip device. And it has a beautiful ending. This was first published in 1959 and appeared in "The Saturday Evening Post". I have found it difficult to get. I do have it in a paperback anthology published by Scholastic in 1969: "11 Great Horror Stories". It certainly is not a horror story and I am glad to see the story finally available for Kindle in its original collection.
February 8, 2009
The past is still out there somewhere, and Jack Finney has all kinds of ways to find it. I absolutely love this book!
March 30, 2011
I found reading I Love Galesburg in the Springtime an odd, almost dislocating experience. The well-worn Newton library copy that I borrowed was a first printing -- nearly fifty years old. But the thematic thread of nostalgia runs through many of these ten stories, perhaps most bluntly stated in "The Love Letter," in which the contemporary (early sixties) 24-year old narrator pines for a time he can't recall:
Reading an old book preoccupied with its own past, I felt like Steven Wright putting instant coffee in the microwave: I almost went back in time.
Finney's ordinary people generally encounter some strange element or occurance that transcends the need for explanation. There's something distinctly not un-Twilight Zone-ish, about the plots and moods of these stories, but there's a key difference. Serling and the writers he worked with crafted morality tales, but in "Galesburg" one finds amorality tales. Not immorality tales (although bad apples don't necessarily get a comeuppance) but not overly concerned with delivering a message either. I was a little bugged by a couple of the protagonists' attitudes toward women (especially the narrator of "Love, Your Magic Spell is Everywhere," who gets a pair of comic-book-ad-style X-ray glasses that really work) but in general this volume didn't require too much historical perspective. (Or maybe I've been watching too much Mad Men.) But Finney's prose is crisp and colorful, and even when his tales clearly telegraph their conclusions, I found most of them satisfying.
At least two of the stories in this book have a connection to Finney's later work: "The Coin Collector" forms the basis of his novel The Woodrow Wilson Dime; "The Intrepid Aeronaut" seems like an early treatment of themes Finney would explore at greater length in The Night People.
And in the solid construction of every one of those lost houses in that ancient photograph there had been left over the time, skill, money, and inclination to decorate their eaves with scrollwork; to finish a job with craftsmanship and pride. And time, too, to build huge wide porches on which families sat on summer evenings with palm-leaf fans.
Reading an old book preoccupied with its own past, I felt like Steven Wright putting instant coffee in the microwave: I almost went back in time.
Finney's ordinary people generally encounter some strange element or occurance that transcends the need for explanation. There's something distinctly not un-Twilight Zone-ish, about the plots and moods of these stories, but there's a key difference. Serling and the writers he worked with crafted morality tales, but in "Galesburg" one finds amorality tales. Not immorality tales (although bad apples don't necessarily get a comeuppance) but not overly concerned with delivering a message either. I was a little bugged by a couple of the protagonists' attitudes toward women (especially the narrator of "Love, Your Magic Spell is Everywhere," who gets a pair of comic-book-ad-style X-ray glasses that really work) but in general this volume didn't require too much historical perspective. (Or maybe I've been watching too much Mad Men.) But Finney's prose is crisp and colorful, and even when his tales clearly telegraph their conclusions, I found most of them satisfying.
At least two of the stories in this book have a connection to Finney's later work: "The Coin Collector" forms the basis of his novel The Woodrow Wilson Dime; "The Intrepid Aeronaut" seems like an early treatment of themes Finney would explore at greater length in The Night People.
May 16, 2011
It was so fun to read an early Jack Finney collection of short stories. Knowing him best for his novels "Time and Again" and "From Time to Time" I expected all of these stories to revolve around time travel. But some of these were "merely" fantastical. Whatever the genre, Jack Finney writes like he's the (not boring) guy next to you on an airplane recounting a story: his, or someone else's. His writing does not announce itself, and the stories are delightful.
My favorite short story from this collection is "The Intrepid Aeronaut" about a mild-mannered fellow in a suburban neighborhood who takes it into his head to build a hot air balloon and go soaring over the Marin Hills and San Francisco Bay at night. It's a perfect pearl of a story!
Good luck finding this book. It's highly collectible and expensive if you do find it. I was lucky to have it lent to me by my excellent cousin, Lori.
My favorite short story from this collection is "The Intrepid Aeronaut" about a mild-mannered fellow in a suburban neighborhood who takes it into his head to build a hot air balloon and go soaring over the Marin Hills and San Francisco Bay at night. It's a perfect pearl of a story!
Good luck finding this book. It's highly collectible and expensive if you do find it. I was lucky to have it lent to me by my excellent cousin, Lori.
December 2, 2011
A book of short stories with a touch of fantasy in each. Enjoyable reading even if a little dated today. It was this book that led me to others by Jack Finney and I have yet to be disappointed.
August 31, 2013
I won't wonder if some of these stories is cinemalised. Interesting ideas in it. Enjoyed reading.
August 21, 2017
This is the second time I've read this wonderful book. I just love the way Mr. Finney brings back the old times so easily. He makes the past seem like a fresher time.
September 25, 2017
The entire book reminded me of the Twilight Zone episode, A Stop at Willoughby. And I loved it!
Read
January 2, 2020I read this years ago and wanted to obtain an original copy. It has gotten quite expensive in the first edition, but my oldest daughter located an affordable one for me in great condition for my Christmas present this year. I've already reread the "I Love Galesburg in the Springtime" short story, which is the first one. Galesburg is my hometown and the reporter in that chapter is a hometown boy writing for the Galesburg Register-Mail, which is where my sister started her newspaper career. Wonderful short pieces from the late, great Jack Finney, who loved Galesburg.
September 1, 2021
A very nice collection of short stories by an author that really should get more attention based on his body of work. Some elements of fantasy or science fiction in almost all of the stories but a touch of the whimsical makes them all a joy to read. Highly recommended.
March 26, 2013
As always with him, the constant nostalgia bit is a drawback. The magic glasses story was really hokey. But contains two classics: "Hey, Look At Me" (despite the lame title) and "The Intrepid Aeronaut"--I believe also (and better) known as "Home Alone." Love him putting his initials on top of the Golden Gate Bridge tower as a final touch. Also touching--if more than usually far-fetched--was "The Love Letter." The funny thing is how some of this stuff can be looked at as pretty evil if you're not so comfortable with the premises: like the house sucking the Cluetts into the past or the car that hits the guy who was thinking of chopping down some trees.
Want to read
July 16, 2011Stephen King recommended book and author.
Book noted as "important to the genre we have been discussing" from Danse Macabre, published in 1981. Author discussed in chapter 9.
Book noted as "important to the genre we have been discussing" from Danse Macabre, published in 1981. Author discussed in chapter 9.
May 1, 2021
My favorite of Finney's fantasy short story collections. One of my comfort reads.
Displaying 1 - 16 of 16 reviews