Richard Yates (novelist) - Short Fiction

Short Fiction

Yates was also an acclaimed author of short stories.

Eleven Kinds of Loneliness, Yates' first collection, followed the publication of his famed first novel Revolutionary Road by a single year. It was compared favorably to James Joyce's Dubliners (all of its stories take place in and around the boroughs of New York City as opposed to Joyce's Dublin) and eventually achieved a kind of cult status among fiction writers despite its relative obscurity. One later New York Times essay praised Yates' "exposure of the small fiercely defended dignities and much vaster humiliations of characters who might have been picked almost at random from the fat telephone book of the Borough of Queens."

Yates' second collection, Liars in Love, appeared nearly twenty years later, in 1981, and was again met with a positive critical reception. Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, writing for the Times, called the stories "wonderfully crafted," and concluded that "every detail of this collection stays alive and fresh in one's memory."

Despite this, only one of Yates' short stories ever appeared in The New Yorker (after repeated rejections), and none during his lifetime. This story, "The Canal," was published in the magazine nine years after the author's death to celebrate the 2001 release of The Collected Stories of Richard Yates, a collection that was again met with great critical fanfare.