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49 Stories
Complete texts of Assembly and The Cape Cod Lighter .Modern Library Giant G88.Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 63-15047.
Hardcover
First published January 1, 1962
21 people want to read
About the author
John O'Hara
226 books296 followersAmerican writer John Henry O'Hara contributed short stories to the New Yorker and wrote novels, such as
BUtterfield 8
(1935) and
Ten North Frederick
(1955).
Best-selling works of John Henry O'Hara include Appointment in Samarra . People particularly knew him for an uncannily accurate ear for dialogue. O'Hara, a keen observer of social status and class differences, wrote frequently about the socially ambitious.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_O&#...
Best-selling works of John Henry O'Hara include Appointment in Samarra . People particularly knew him for an uncannily accurate ear for dialogue. O'Hara, a keen observer of social status and class differences, wrote frequently about the socially ambitious.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_O&#...
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
December 21, 2008
49 stories of small-city Pennsylvania and New York City, many of them from the bootlegging era, of the time when everybody read the Bulletin and splash of mixer in a drink was called a spoiler.
Direct prose, dialog-driven story-telling. Each tale is a dirty martini with its own olive of despair.
Direct prose, dialog-driven story-telling. Each tale is a dirty martini with its own olive of despair.
March 29, 2016
John O'Hara wrote hundreds of short stories, and most of them are pretty bad. But a few are brilliant and well worth tracking down. This particular collection contains two of his classics, "Exactly Eight Thousand Dollars Exactly" and "Winter Dance," along with a couple of very good runners up like "You Don't Remember Me" and "The Compliment."
"Eight Thousand Dollars" is about two brothers who confront each other after an estrangement that has lasted decades. The brutal, bullying, older brother is now aging, short of money, but as mean as ever. The younger brother is hardworking, clean cut, and the head of his own hi-tech firm. What makes the story so amazing is that it's not just about the two brothers but about the passage of time, the way America changed so fast in the Twentieth Century that a Country Club for wealthy families in the Twenties is now as distant as Atlantis. O'Hara writes like a man of F. Scott Fitzgerald's generation who is suddenly face to face with Nuclear War and the Space Age. And he's brilliant, making the modern world seem garish and terrifying even if the old one contained injustice and suffering. The vile older brother is a living symbol of that older world, both hateful and somehow bigger than the plastic world that has replaced him. I reread this story today and it was even better than I remembered!
"Winter Dance" is a much warmer story about a boy in the Twenties with a huge crush on a richer, older girl. What makes it so much fun is how it captures the magic of Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby but with a hero and heroine who are just teenagers, and also much warmer and more likable. There was something very Hemingway about the story also, a certain Nick Adams quality to the way the boy and the girl both enjoy winter sports and the outdoors as much as they enjoy each other. This is a great story for cheering yourself up!
"You Don't Remember Me" is a brief sketch about a beautiful young girl having an affair with a no good older man, and how she's so hard on the surface and so innocent underneath. O'Hara is a genius at putting a whole community's perspective into a very short story. "The Compliment" is an amazing story about two women who are natural rivals but have enormous respect for each other. John Updyke once said that very few people realize who extraordinary John O'Hara's women characters really are. This story is a perfect example of that!
It's interesting that O'Hara wrote so many bad stories and yet when he wrote good ones they were often really great. It's also interesting that when he's on there's no telling what world will come to light. He covers almost fifty years of American life!
"Eight Thousand Dollars" is about two brothers who confront each other after an estrangement that has lasted decades. The brutal, bullying, older brother is now aging, short of money, but as mean as ever. The younger brother is hardworking, clean cut, and the head of his own hi-tech firm. What makes the story so amazing is that it's not just about the two brothers but about the passage of time, the way America changed so fast in the Twentieth Century that a Country Club for wealthy families in the Twenties is now as distant as Atlantis. O'Hara writes like a man of F. Scott Fitzgerald's generation who is suddenly face to face with Nuclear War and the Space Age. And he's brilliant, making the modern world seem garish and terrifying even if the old one contained injustice and suffering. The vile older brother is a living symbol of that older world, both hateful and somehow bigger than the plastic world that has replaced him. I reread this story today and it was even better than I remembered!
"Winter Dance" is a much warmer story about a boy in the Twenties with a huge crush on a richer, older girl. What makes it so much fun is how it captures the magic of Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby but with a hero and heroine who are just teenagers, and also much warmer and more likable. There was something very Hemingway about the story also, a certain Nick Adams quality to the way the boy and the girl both enjoy winter sports and the outdoors as much as they enjoy each other. This is a great story for cheering yourself up!
"You Don't Remember Me" is a brief sketch about a beautiful young girl having an affair with a no good older man, and how she's so hard on the surface and so innocent underneath. O'Hara is a genius at putting a whole community's perspective into a very short story. "The Compliment" is an amazing story about two women who are natural rivals but have enormous respect for each other. John Updyke once said that very few people realize who extraordinary John O'Hara's women characters really are. This story is a perfect example of that!
It's interesting that O'Hara wrote so many bad stories and yet when he wrote good ones they were often really great. It's also interesting that when he's on there's no telling what world will come to light. He covers almost fifty years of American life!
January 4, 2016
This is an excellent collection of short stories by John O'Hara. I found a hardcover edition of this collection in a small used bookstore in Placerville, California, over the Christmas holidays and snapped it up. It contains some 'old friends' that I had read previously, but also quite a number of stories that were new to me. John O'Hara is a master at telling the stories of ordinary people in very ordinary places, and his deft touch with dialog makes the reader feel as though they are right there with the story's protagonists. Most of O'Hara's stories feature the people and times of mid-Atlantic America in the first half of the 20th century. I highly recommend this collection of 49 Stories by John O'Hara. This collection gets 4.5 stars of 5 from me.
September 10, 2022
Only read selected stories.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews