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Loading... Collected Fiction: The Young Lions, Bread Upon the Waters, Short Stories: Five Decades, and The Troubled Airby Irwin Shaw
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Three acclaimed novels plus collected short fiction by the New York Times-bestselling author of Rich Man, Poor Man. The Young Lions: Irwin Shaw's New York Times-bestselling debut is widely considered one of the four great World War II novels, along with From Here to Eternity, The Naked and the Dead, and The Caine Mutiny. Ambitious in its scope and robust in its prose, this "masterpiece" is also deeply humanistic, presenting the reality of war as seen through the eyes of three ordinary soldiers: a Nazi sergeant, a Jewish American infantryman, and an idealistic urbanite from New York City (TheBoston Globe). Bread Upon the Waters: No good deed goes unpunished? The Strands are a happy family, though not without their financial struggles. When their daughter helps a mugging victim by bringing him home, he turns out to be a Wall Street lawyer whose gratitude is as boundless as his bank account. But with each successive "reward," the Strand family moves farther away from the wealth of happiness they already possessed. Short Stories: Five Decades: Shaw's prolific output of short stories appeared regularly in the pages of the New Yorker and Esquire for over half a century. These sixty-three stories include such iconic works as "The Eighty-Yard Run" and "The Girls in Their Summer Dresses." The Troubled Air: Five employees of Clement Archer's popular radio show are accused Communists. He will have to fire them to keep his show on the air. But it's not a simple choice--whatever Archer decides, he won't be able to keep his hands clean, in Shaw's provocative classic about courage and morality at the height of McCarthyism. No library descriptions found. |
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 Google Books — Loading...GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)813.010806Literature English (North America) American fiction By type Short fictionLC ClassificationRatingAverage: No ratings.Is this you?Become a LibraryThing Author. |
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Wikipedia in English
Short Stories, Five Decades **** stars
Shaw is a wonderful short story writer, and none of these many stories is unenjoyable. The early stories, taking place during the hard times before World War II, and the stories that take place during and immediately after the war, are more gritty, but the whole series of stories, which seems to be in chronological order, tells a pretty good history of the middle part of the American 20th Century. Only after reading deep into the collection did I begin to have a few niggling doubts. Shaw's male characters ring quite true, and it is easy to identify with their ideals and their quirks, even when Shaw is trying to make a point using some odd behavior, such as the voyeurism in the last story. But his female characters seem well out of date. Perhaps they are a good representation of how women felt about themselves then and the stereotypes they subscribed to, but perhaps not. In the end, this doesn't take away from the immense enjoyment of such a well-crafted collection of stories, but it does leave them more as consistently entertaining, usually informative historical artifacts than as masterpieces of the genre.