These days, when I return to Gloversville, my mother is often with me, because the purpose of our trip is usually to visit her sister, and when I turn onto Lower Kingsborough my mother always studies the small, well-maintained houses set closer to the street and to one another than the larger homes farther up, and she invariably remarks that all these little houses are cute as a button. Lower Kingsborough Avenue is narrower, its houses more modest, mostly split-level ranches and tiny capes, built with money from the GI Bill by men and women of my parents’ generation. Upper Kingsborough is wide and bordered by mature maples and elms, and it’s where the finest houses were built back when the glove shops and tanneries were still in operation and there was, at least for a select few, money. The main residential street of Gloversville, New York, where I grew up and where my parents and grandparents spent most of their adult lives (there and in neighboring Johnstown) is Kingsborough Avenue, and it’s divided into Upper and Lower. Here is what I’ve come to think of as my Richard Yates story. To my mind, he writes like a period piece, these stories are a snapshot of mid-century America, warts and all. I have also read that people from outside the US have difficulty understanding many of his references, and the experiences he describes. It can be dry at points, and some of the stories can go on a bit. I suppose that his writing is not for everybody. There is such reality in his writing that he not only paints a picture, he recreates a picture from within your own mind. Yates so clearly shapes his characters that it is almost impossible not to feel their emotions. One also relates to the urge to create an image of toughness and otherness in order to impress the locals. As a child who was moved around the country quite a bit, one relates to the fear of recess and lunch hour, and trying to find small spaces in which to hide and be alone. As a method of coping with the change, the child adopts a few survival mechanisms in order to make himself seem interesting and tough. The story mentioned above is about a child who is transplanted from his Brooklyn home into a middle-to-upper class suburb wherein his accent and his background separate him from the other students. One story in particular, "Doctor Jack-o'-Lantern," had me weeping for both the nostalgia of childhood, and the pain of remembering those tough school-yard days of loneliness and solitude (which I believe is the actual meaning of the word nostalgia a remembrance of pain). This collection of stories illustrates the vibrant and vivid writings of Yates perfectly. Published with a moving introduction by the novelist Richard Russo, this collection will stand as its author's final masterpiece. His stories, as empathetic as they are unforgiving, are like no others in our nation's literature. Whether addressing the smothered desire of suburban housewives, the white-collar despair of Manhattan office workers, the grim humor that attends life on a tuberculosis ward, or the moments of terrified peace experienced by American soldiers in World War II, Yates examines every frayed corner of the American dream. This collection, as powerful as Yate's beloved Revolutionary Road, contains the stories of his classic works Eleven Kinds of Loneliness (a book The New York Times Book Review hailed as "the New York equivalent of Dubliners") and Liars in Love it also features nine new stories, seven of which have never been published. Richard Yates was acclaimed as one of the most powerful, compassionate, and technically accomplished writers of America's postwar generation, and his work has inspired such diverse talents as Richard Ford, Ann Beattie, André Dubus, Robert Stone, and Kurt Vonnegut Jr. A literary event of the highest order, The Collected Stories of Richard Yates brings together Yates's peerless short fiction in a single volume for the first time.
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