Stories and Poems
Rudyard Kipling and Daniel Karlin
Book
'Hear and attend and listen...' Rudyard Kipling is a supreme master of the short story in English...
Road Brothers Stories
Book
A volume of short stories by the bestselling author of THE BROKEN EMPIRE series, Mark Lawrence ...
The Steel Flea
Book
'He gave orders that they were not to get any hot glum pudding in flames, for fear the spirits in...
Three Moments of an Explosion: Stories
Book
The multi-award-winning China Mieville has been called 'the equal of David Mitchell or Zadie Smith'...
David McK (3557 KP) rated Biggles: The Camels Are Coming in Books
Jan 3, 2021
Thankfully, Amazon doesn't know (or care).
I've just re-read this for the first time in something like 30 odd years, and it's amazing how well it actually holds together all those years later.
Like 'Biggles Learns To Fly' (which I also re-read recently), this is more a collection of short stories with little in the real way of any over-arching plot: vignettes which, if the author is to be believed (and I've no reason not to) are all based on true stories that either happened to him or that he heard about during his earliest flying days in the latter stages of World War One.
While the character of Biggles may not be as popular or as well-known today as during the years in which the stories were written (the 1930 through to the 1990s), there's a reason why they have endured as long as they have ...
The First Forty-Nine Stories
Book
From Ernest Hemingway's Preface: 'There are many kinds of stories in this book. I hope you will find...
Complete Prose
Book
Although Woody Allen is best known for his cult movies, he is also a writer of outstanding wit and...
The Quarter
7.0
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Book
These recently discovered stories by Nobel Laureate Naguib Mahfouz take us deep into the beating...
Short Stories Egypt
Haley Mathiot (9 KP) rated Girl Meets Boy: Because There Are Two Sides to Every Story in Books
Apr 27, 2018
Instead I got a very strange and rather awkward mix of sex-addicts, homosexuals, transgender, and native Americans.
I'm not saying I don't like those stories, I'm just saying I wasn't expecting it.
The above reasons are not why I didn't like the stories: those are just facts about the characters. The stories themselves just didn't seem to connect to me, I couldn't relate to any of them. Maybe it's because I'm one of those weird girls with a completely functional romantic relationship, but a lot of the content in this book was just like "uh… why are they acting like that?"
Anyway, it felt awkward. that's the only word I can use to describe it. Some of them were good, some of them sucked. Most of the writing was mediocre.
I guess all I can say is… this is probably the worst short story collection I've ever read. Sorry, I wanted to like it… It was just awkward.
*This review is copyright Haley Mathiot and Amazon Vine*
Dana (24 KP) rated Shards and Ashes in Books
Mar 23, 2018
I did not really like this book, but I have read most of these authors and I have loved their books before, so I think it may have been the subject matter or something, because this was not my cup of tea.
For starters, all the stories were grossly depressing. I can take sad stories, we all know that, but this was to another level of sad. It was like there was no hope in most of these and I just couldn't get behind it.
I understand if people like these stories, I won't hold it against you if you do, but I am not a fan.
Even the worlds of these stories were under-developed. The rules of the worlds were not explained, so there was no reasoning for why these characters did what they did. It was disappointing to say the least.
I am not giving up on these authors, especially since I like quite a few of them.