The Best of Roald Dahl (Paperback)
Includes the stories "The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar" and "The Ratcatcher," soon to be short films from Wes Anderson on Netflix
A collection of the best short stories from a writer with "an ingenious imagination, a fascination with odd and ordinary detail, and a lust for its thorough exploitation" (The New York Times Book Review).
If Stephen King could write with murderous concision, he might have come up with "The Landlady," the story of a boarding house with an oddly talented proprietress and a small but permanent clientele. If Clive Barker had a sense of humor, he might have written "Pig," a brutally funny look at cooks and vegetarianism. And a more bloodthirsty Jorge Luis Borges might have imagined the fanatical little gambler in "Man From the South," who does his betting with a hammer, nails, and a butcher knife.
But all these stories in this volume were written by Roald Dahl, whose genius for the horrific and grotesque is unparalleled and entirely his own.
A collection of the best short stories from a writer with "an ingenious imagination, a fascination with odd and ordinary detail, and a lust for its thorough exploitation" (The New York Times Book Review).
If Stephen King could write with murderous concision, he might have come up with "The Landlady," the story of a boarding house with an oddly talented proprietress and a small but permanent clientele. If Clive Barker had a sense of humor, he might have written "Pig," a brutally funny look at cooks and vegetarianism. And a more bloodthirsty Jorge Luis Borges might have imagined the fanatical little gambler in "Man From the South," who does his betting with a hammer, nails, and a butcher knife.
But all these stories in this volume were written by Roald Dahl, whose genius for the horrific and grotesque is unparalleled and entirely his own.
ROALD DAHL (1916-1990) was born in Llandaff, South Wales, and went to Repton School in England. His parents were Norwegian, so holidays were spent in Norway. As he explains in Boy, he turned down the idea of university in favor of a job that would take him to 'a wonderful faraway place'. In 1933 he joined the Shell Company, which sent him to Mombasa in East Africa. When World War II began in 1939 he became a fighter pilot and in 1942 was made assistant air attaché in Washington, where he started to write short stories. His first major success as a writer for children was in 1964. Thereafter his children's books brought him increasing popularity, and when he died children mourned the world over, particularly in Britain where he had lived for many years.
"Dahl has the mastery of plot and characters possessed by great writers of the past, along with a wildness and wryness of his own. One of his trademarks is writing beautifully about the ugly, even the horrible." —Los Angeles Times
"An ingenious imagination, a fascination with odd and ordinary detail, and a lust for its thorough exploitation are the ... strengths of Dahl's storytelling." —The New York Times Book Review
"The mind of Roald Dahl is quintessentially nasty and wicked." —The Washington Post
"An ingenious imagination, a fascination with odd and ordinary detail, and a lust for its thorough exploitation are the ... strengths of Dahl's storytelling." —The New York Times Book Review
"The mind of Roald Dahl is quintessentially nasty and wicked." —The Washington Post