Collected Stories of Gwyn Jones

by Gwyn Jones

Review “ . . . models of English prose.” –Meic Stephens, Western Mail -- Meic Stephens ― Western Mail“ . . . Descriptively, he can be brilliantly effective at evoking the natural world . . . and the tensions between men and women, the emotional shifts and recriminations, are often powerfully convincing.” –Planet ― Planet“This book confirms that Gwyn Jones, a critic and scholar with an international reputation, also deserves his status as creative writer of major significance.” –Western Mail ― Western Mail Product Description Glyn Jones was one of the brilliant first generation of Welsh writers in English which included Dylan Thomas, Rhys Davies and Idris Davies. A major figure on the Welsh literary scene for almost sixty years, Glyn Jones’s short stories are among his finest achievements; of his first collection, The Blue Bed (1937), Edward Garnett wrote, ‘Glyn Jones is a genius ... his stories have a strange imaginative quality about them unlike anything else’.This volume is the first to bring together all Glyn Jones’s short stories and includes ‘I was born in the Ystrad Valley’, a long story about an armed rebellion in the south Wales valleys, here republished for the first time since the 1930s. Set mainly either in the scruffy streets of his boyhood Merthyr or in the luxuriant Carmarthenshire countryside, the stories show the rich variety of tone that characterizes Glyn Jones’s fiction. Acutely aware of the pain and suffering in the world around him, Jones is also deeply responsive to the mysterious and sensuous beauty of the natural world and to the resilience and humour of ordinary, fallible human beings. By turn comic, sensuous, grotesque, even unreal, the stories can be deeply moving in their compassion. Set in Wales, they are universal in their humanity. About the Author Gwyn Jones, who was born at Blackwood, Monmouthshire, in 1907, is a scholar, a teacher and a creative writer of great distinction. In addition to his academic publications, a large number of articles and the short stories, he has published several novels, the best known of which is Times Like These.