If you never read anything else by Capote, read A Christmas Memory. The short story has to be one of the most tender, yet most gut-wrenching story ever written. It will make you cry because the ending is sad but it is one of the most perfect endings ever.
The Christmas Memory is one story in The Complete Stories of Truman Capote. As in all story collections there are some good, some great, and some okay. But the great ones in this book are spectacular. I never realized that Capote mastered different genres. One, Master Misery, is a horror story as frightening as a Stephen King offering. They range all over the place, from New York City to New Orleans to a prison to a small town in Alabama.
Some stories are products of their time so he uses words like "colored" for African-Americans but that's probably because they were written in the forties and fifties.
A fine collection of short stories.

5 stars for Niles!

Wow. Sono sinceramente in difficoltà. C'è talmente tanta varietà qui dentro che riassumere tutto in poche parole è impossibile. Ciò che posso dire con certezza è che Truman Capote è ufficialmente entrato nell'Olimpo dei miei autori preferiti. Innamorata della sua prosa elegante, delle sue atmosfere misteriosi e quasi perturbanti, dei suoi personaggi tridimensionali e delle sue storie effimere.

In quest'opera, che racchiude tutti i racconti di dell'autore in ordine cronologico, troviamo le due sfaccettature di Truman: c'è il Truman bambino, avido di affetto e di tenerezza, capace di trasformare in poesia gli odori, i sapori, i suoni della sua campagna dell'Alabama; e c'è il Truman più maturo, giunto in una New York caotica e sfavillante, colmo di una curiosità e di una meraviglia che si scontra con la disillusione dei suoi abitanti più ricchi.

In questi racconti c'è tenerezza, mistero, indifferenza, tristezza, quotidianità, malinconia, senso di straniamento, di oppressione.

Avrei voluto che ogni singolo racconto fosse solo l'inizio di un romanzo più lungo. Eppure mi rendo conto che se allungati perderebbero il loro magnetismo.

Bello? Bello bello.

In Cold Blood was the first Capote work I read, and this the second. I remain struck by how skillfully he builds scenes and atmosphere and just sucks you in. It happened 100 times faster in these short stories than it did in the book—no small feat considering I read while commuting on public transportation. The real world just disappeared and I found myself in Capote's characters' worlds, watching and feeling as the stories unfolded.

I'm not necessarily from any of the characters' worlds, but the stories are relatable because they're told with raw honesty. These stories divulge intimate choices and thoughts and desires, exposing the complexity of what it means to be human. Capote does this so well that sometimes—most of the time—reading the collection felt like reading someone's diary.

Excerpts that struck me:

Shut a Final Door

"...[S]he told him: 'Sorry, Walter, I can't afford you any longer. I understand you very well, and I have a certain amount of sympathy. It's very compulsive, your malice, and you aren't too much to blame, but I don't want ever to see you again because I'm not so well myself that I can afford it.'" (117)

Children on Their Birthdays

"'My precious papa said I live in the sky, but if he'd lived more in the sky he'd be rich like he wanted to be. The trouble with my papa was he did not love the Devil, he let the Devil love him. But I am very smart in that respect; I know the next best thing is very often the best.'" (145)

"It has not been easy for him, Miss Bobbit's going. Because she'd meant more than that. Than what? Than being thirteen years old and crazy in love. She was the queer things in him, like the pecan tree and liking books and caring enough about people to let them hurt him. She was the things he was afraid to show anyone else." (153)

The Thanksgiving Visitor

"Perhaps it was strange for a young boy to have as his best friend an aging spinster, but neither of us had an ordinary outlook or background, and so it was inevitable, in our separate loneliness, that we should come to share a friendship apart." (243)

Mojave

"A few he had discovered himself; the majority were 'romances' she herself had stage-managed, friends she'd introduced him to, confidantes she had trusted to provide him with an outlet but not to exceed the mark." (285)

"'It doesn't matter whose fault it is. We all, sometimes, leave each other out there under the skies, and we never understand why.'" (285)

I lowered my initial rating from 4.5 to 3.5 stars upon going through my annotations. Truman Capote wrote 20 short stories – 8 of which I highly enjoyed, 5 I appreciate and 7 I didn't enjoy and/or didn't remember at all. This is quite a good score as I am usually struggling with short stories.

The thing that stood out the most to me is the fact that Truman managed to take the most simple and true-to-life situations – like a train ride home, the holiday season, suburban life – and spin them in a way to make them absolutely unique, at times even magical. Most of his stories left a lasting impression on me and I even found a new all-time favorite in A Christmas Memory (gosh, how I love that story).

n  It's always the same: a morning arrives in November, and my friend, as though officially inaugurating the Christmas time of year that exhilarates her imagination and fuels the blaze of her heart, announces: "It's fruitcake weather! Fetch our buggy. Help me find my hat."n

A Christmas Memory combines everything I love in a good short story: it has the perfect length (it didn't leave me wanting more, and it didn't feel like it dragged on for too long), the characters are quick to love and within a few lines one already feels very close to them, and the plot at hand is easily accessible (Truman jumps straight into the action but despite this everything feels familiar and in the right place).

I am such a sucker for intergenerational friendships and the one between our seven-year-old narrator and his elderly cousin is just so wholesome and pure, I can't even deal. They had me squealing and grinning from ear to ear, and by the end, crying my heart out.

n  And when that happens, I know it. A message saying so merely confirms a piece of news some secret vein had already received, severing from me an irreplaceable part of myself, letting it loose like a kite on a broken string. That is why, walking across a school campus on this particular December morning, I keep searching the sky. As if I expected to see, rather like hearts, a lost pair of kites hurrying toward heaven.n

The humor was on point and ran smoothly through the story. Despite its heavy ending, it definitely has a light-hearted tone and is just overall a delightful (Christmas) tale. And the loving portrayal of non-conforming people whom others may deem queer is everything I want to see in fiction.

(Don't think I'm giving Truman a pass, he's fucked up big time, especially in his portrayal of POC in his fiction and his treatment of POC in real life but A Christmas Memory was pretty fucking flawless in regards to the representation.)

In general, Truman didn't shy away from writing about *different* protagonists. In Among the Paths to Eden, a widow is lurking on the local graveyard in hunt for a newly-widowed male lover. In Children on Their Birthdays, Miss Lily Jane Bobbit moves to a rural area in Alabama and breaks the hearts of all the boys in town, only to be run over by a bus. In My Side of the Matter, our protagonist is currently in hiding from his wife's aunts. Both of which are waiting outside of his room with a fourteen-inch hog knife ready to slice him open.

Truman also had a gift for ambiguous endings, and I was so here for all of them. When Miriam ended with the single word "Hello" and the reader is left in the dark as to who exactly said it, I was rocking in my chair screaming. Hot damn. In A Tree of Night, Truman creates this intense and creepy atmosphere as a naive young woman is cornered on a train, and the reader has to fill in the blanks as to what'll happen next. Most of his short stories really got me thinking and I appreciate that.

Nonetheless, there are still a bunch of trashy short stories in this collection that I'd recommend skipping. The Bargain, House of Flowers, Mojave and Shut a Final Door all deal with fucked up relationships of some sort – they're mostly about a married couple/lovers growing estranged from one another due to the fact that the man is a complete and utter asshole. There's a whole lot of sexism in these stories and his explicit language (e.g. his use of the word "cock" or "cunt") felt very out of place, and just there to "shock" the reader. It didn't really work for me. One Christmas was a huge let down as well. I thought I would absolutely eat that shit up as it is a sequel to A Christmas Memory but a lot of Truman's later short stories didn't match the brilliancy of his earlier ones. In One Christmas, Truman tried to manipulate the reader into caring for his characters by providing a super cliché "I was neglected by my father, pity me"-type of story that had my eyes rolling.

In conclusion, I am very happy that I checked out Truman's Complete Stories. He is definitely a gifted writer and produced some gems that'll stay with me for a long time. Given the fact, that I didn't really mind a third of these short stories, I think that a 3.5 stars-rating is actually pretty fucking fair.

Meu primeiro livro do Truman Capote foi esse livro de contos, porque sempre acho que esse tipo de livro é uma prova de fogo pra criatividade de um escritor. Nao me decepcionei. Boas estórias e bons personagens na maioria dos contos.

Si crees que conoces a Truman Capote porque viste a Audrey Hepburn en Breakfast at Tiffany's (o Desayuno con diamantes, como incomprensiblemente se tradujo en España), déjame decirte que te estás perdiendo lo esencial. Los cuentos son donde realmente encuentras al verdadero Capote: un observador minucioso de la fragilidad humana, capaz de capturar tanto la belleza como la devastación con una precisión escalofriante.

En Un recuerdo navideño, tal vez su relato más autobiográfico, Capote nos ofrece una píldora de inocencia que, al colisionar con la dureza de la vida, se transforma en una tristeza arrolladora. La relación con la tía Sook, tan tierna como desgarradora, nos muestra cómo el amor puede protegernos de todo, menos de nosotros mismos. Esta historia, junto con El invitado del Día de Acción de Gracias y Una Navidad, en los que la figura de la tía Sook regresa, como una presencia constante en la vida del narrador, nos ofrece un retrato íntimo de la pérdida de la inocencia y el desarraigo emocional.

En Un árbol de noche, Capote lleva la angustia a otro nivel: un simple trayecto en tren se convierte en una pesadilla que destila soledad y vulnerabilidad.

Y luego está Miriam. Una niña que se cuela en la vida de una mujer solitaria y desata el caos con una sutileza perturbadora. Capote te atrapa en una atmósfera densa, donde la normalidad se disuelve en lo inquietante.

El visón propio tiene ese giro que solo Capote sabe dar. La historia de una mujer que ya no tiene nada que ofrecerle al mundo, una especie de visión cruel de cómo la vida te descarta, pero a la vez esconde una crítica feroz a esa élite a la que parece que todos quieren pertenecer, hasta que se dan cuenta de que, en realidad, nunca lo hicieron. Es un golpe a las falsas apariencias y a las prioridades equivocadas. Esta historia revela, en su subtexto, la clase de aislamiento al que todos somos susceptibles, especialmente cuando la sociedad dicta quién merece ser visto y quién no.

Algo similar a lo que sucede en Las paredes están frías, donde se presenta el choque entre dos realidades durante una fiesta en el lujoso apartamento de una joven de familia adinerada. La llegada inesperada de unos marineros provoca una alteración en la anfitriona, enfrentándola a una tensión interna entre la atracción y el rechazo.

O Mojave, uno de esos relatos que te atrapan por su atmósfera melancólica, donde la soledad parece ser el único paisaje posible.

En general, lo que más me impacta de estos cuentos es cómo Capote no juega a escribir sobre el sufrimiento ajeno. No está buscando tu lástima ni tu compasión; está simplemente escribiendo lo que ve. Y lo que ve no es bonito, pero es real. Esos momentos que él plasma en sus personajes no solo nos hacen reflexionar sobre la fragilidad humana, sino sobre el precio que pagamos por la soledad, el desarraigo y los sueños rotos. En su mundo, la soledad no tiene adornos ni consuelo, y cada gesto cuenta. Si Carson McCullers tiñe la soledad de melancolía, Capote la aborda con una mirada irónica, casi desafiante. Es un retrato crudo de lo que somos cuando nadie está mirando.

A diferencia de lo que muchos podrían pensar, Desayuno en Tiffany’s no es la obra que define a Capote. Sí, está ahí, claro, pero si realmente quieres sentir la esencia de este escritor, tienes que sumergirte en sus cuentos. No hay lugar para el glamour de Hollywood; hay tristeza, ironía y esas vidas rotas que él entendió como pocos.

Si A sangre fría te mostró su capacidad para diseccionar la mente humana con una frialdad casi documental, los cuentos revelan un lado distinto de Capote: uno donde la emoción está a flor de piel, y la oscuridad, aunque igualmente presente, se vive de una manera más íntima y cercana. Capote te enfrenta a la crudeza de sus personajes sin adornos. Cada cuento es un pequeño universo donde lo ordinario se convierte en algo profundamente extraño y donde la soledad, el desarraigo y la vulnerabilidad son los hilos conductores que conectan estos relatos, cada uno más perturbador que el anterior. Son relatos que no solo se leen; se viven, se ven y se sienten. La forma en que construye las escenas y manipula el tiempo narrativo le da a sus cuentos una textura visual que es poco habitual en los relatos de esa época. Historias como Miriam o Un árbol de noche tienen una estructura que podría trasladarse fácilmente a la pantalla, con un sentido del ritmo y la tensión que recuerda a Hitchcock.

Leer los Cuentos completos de Truman Capote es abrir una ventana a las verdades que evitamos mirar de frente. Pocos escritores han logrado retratar con tanta precisión el desarraigo, la vulnerabilidad y las esperanzas frustradas. Si buscas una experiencia literaria que te sacuda de principio a fin, este libro es el lugar perfecto para empezar. Capote no escribe para complacerte; escribe para que no puedas olvidarlo.

I can see quite easily why Truman Capote referred to his collected short stories as his "Great Love". He was a rare master of words, possessed of a talent for prose that I've seen myself only in F. Scott Fitzgerald, and the scant body of work that he left behind before his passing (the same month and year that I was born; we were alive on the earth together for only days) is enough to keep me full until my last breath. Each of his tales sparkle with flawlessness and the emotion inherent in them teased tears from my eyes (especially the last lines from 'A Christmas Memory' and 'One Christmas'). Truman Capote was a master, a writer's writer, and I'm exceedingly thankful for the literary fruit that he left behind for us to feast upon.

The man is a genius! This is extremely high praise coming from someone who does not like, never has liked and does not see a future in liking short stories. However, Capote's writing is like prose poems; never a cliché; wonderful insight; delightful reading -- right up until the last "no ending" sentence of each story. I have read IN COLD BLOOD but never anything else by Capote prior to this. I'm on to anything else I can find - it was pure pleasure.....

some charmers

Mooi boek, mooie verhalen. Sommigen zijn sinister, donker en rauw. Anderen luchtig, licht, maar altijd bomvol sfeer en prachtige personages, vaak uit het arme Amerikaanse binnenland in de jaren vijftig.
Het meest genoot ik van 'Kinderen op hun verjaardag', een schitterend verhaal dat mooi eindigt zoals het begint.

These stories are wonderful and brilliantly written. I totally devoured this collection. You often find out more about a writer through his or her short stories than you do through their most successful novels or more commercially successful work. Such is the case, I feel, with Capote.
As with most writers there are general themes and favored character types that populate his pages. It does not spoil the enjoyment of these stories to share my own observations of what these are:
Capote loved women. He trusted women and seemed to relate to them much better than men. He was nowhere near as trusting of men, despite his sexual attraction. One gets the feeling he always thought men would betray him in some way (and in his youth that certainly appeared to be the case). These are hardly remarkable or surprising assumptions given the fact Truman was brought up by female relatives as a child. One aunt in particular befriended the young Truman in a remarkable and magical way; perhaps he spent his adult life seeking similar friendship from other females who simply could not compete with this woman in the gay male/straight female bonding sense.
He also seemed to have a special place in his heart for lost souls, people who are not quite sure where they belong or if they belong at all in this world. Perhaps that was how he sometimes felt.
His childhood seems to have been pretty magical despite his circumstances, and several of the stories are reflective of the mystical and supernatural beauty of growing up in the rural south.
There is a sort of "Twilight Zone" aspect to some of these stories; others reflect a stark human bitterness and sorrow.
I enjoyed most of these stories far more than I did the gruesome grittiness of "In Cold Blood", a book in which it was quite clear he found the bad boys, or at least one of them, to be most attractive rough trade. This is not surprising; perhaps the author had an attraction for wounded bad -azzes all his adult life.
The Truman Capote who hid his pain behind a glittering facade of fabulous parties, celebrity schmoozing, and copious alcohol and drugs is not the Capote that emerges in these pages. It is Capote the boy, hungering and aching for the love of his real father. That void emerges over and over, but it was women who nurtured him, who cared for him, who seemed to see straight into that wounded, aching boy's heart of his. No wonder his most memorable characters were women, while the male characters were more often ghostly, unreliable, or monstrous.
In the end, all the alcohol and drugs could not dull the pain of his deepest longing. That we have these wonderful stories, and particularly the heartbreaking holiday tales, along with one bona fide classic masterpiece, is amazing. I plan to read everything he ever wrote...