ISBN: 9780099518594    Publisher: Random House Year of publishing: 2008     Format:  Paperback No of Pages: 288        Language: English

With his second collection of short stories, Richard Yates continues to extend his range as a writer of stunning power and eloquence.'Liars in Love' is concerned with troubled relations and the elusive nature of truth:Hope, dread, disorder, and a nervous entangling of separate lives in Greenwich Village during the Depression, as seen by a child, in 'Oh, Joseph, I'm So Tired'. The volatile, perilous course of events set in motion when two divorced mothers agree to "pool their resources" and live together, with their children in 'Trying Out for the Race'. A young American soldier's too-abrupt postwar reunion, on foreign soil, with the lovely, dismayingly grown-up sister he hasn't seen since he was eleven and she was ten, in 'A Compassionate Leave'.The seven stories in this collection showcase Yates's extraordinary gift for observation and description. The last and longest of them, a rich, lucid, and compelling piece called 'Saying Goodbye to Sally', achieves a fitting conclusion for the book - and a resonant final statement of its theme.
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Richard Yates was born in 1926 in Yonkers, New York.After serving in the US Army during the Second World War, he worked as a publicity writer for the Remington Rand Corporation, and for a brief period in the sixties as a speech writer for Senator Robert Kennedy. His prize-winning stories first appeared in 1953 and his first novel, 'Revolutionary Road', was nominated for the National Book Award in 1961.He is the author of eight other works, including the novels 'A Good School', 'The Easter Parade' and 'Disturbing the Peace', and two collections of short stories, 'Eleven Kinds of Loneliness' and 'Liars in Love'.Richard Yates was twice divorced and the father of three daughte He died in 1992. Lionel Shriver was born in the United States and now lives in London. She is the author of 'The Female of the Species, Checker and the Derailleurs,' 'The Bleeding Heart' , 'Ordinary Decent Criminals, A Perfectly Good Family, Double Fault', 'The Post-Birthday World' and 'So Much for That'. Her seventh novel, 'We Need to Talk About Kevin', won the Orange Prize for Fiction in 2005.
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