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SHORT STORY 3 by

SHORT STORY 3

By

Pub Date: Sept. 28th, 1960
Publisher: Scribner

This third collection of new writers introduced in book form for the first time is in spite of its readability (from fairly straightforward narratives to the almost wholly abstract) and the variety of authors quite similar in tone; modern not only in language, but in a queer, opaque sense of unreality. Nearly all of the stories deal with abnormal states of mind. In the first, a doctor suffering from a nervous breakdown, rapes a patient, and later there is a blander and rather pleasantly romantic version of Lolita with a conventional ending. Reality becomes increasingly disjointed in the succeeding stories. A man obsessed with owning a perfect car keeps trading in slightly damaged ones, and finally steals a new Cadillac and drives off into the sunset. A science-fiction nightmare comes to an end when a man, who is a drifter, turns into a dog. A final sequence deals with asylum inmates and insulin shock and, where these have any grip on recognizable reality, they are fairly interesting. But on the whole this never-never-land of troubled visions is fairly unsettling reading.