Thomas, D: Collected Stories

This gathering of all Dylan Thomas's stories-ranging chronologically from the dark, almost surrealistic tales of Thomas's youth to such gloriously rumbustious celebrations of life as "A Child's Christmas in Wales" and "Adventures in the Skin Trade"-charts the progress of "The Rimbaud of Cwmdonkin Drive" toward his mastery of the comic idiom. Here, too, are stories originally written for radio and television and, in a short appendix, the schoolboy pieces first published in the Swansea Grammar School Magazine . A high point of the collection is Thomas's "Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog," a vivid collage of memories from his Swansea childhood that combines the lyricism of his poetry with the sparkle and sly humor of Under Milk Wood . Also here is the fiction from Quite Early One Morning , a collection planned by Thomas shortly before his death. Altogether there are more than forty stories, providing a rich and varied literary feast and showing Dylan Thomas in all his intriguing variety-somber fantasist, joyous word-spinner, and irrepressible comedian of smalltown Wales.