It took 2 years and 4 months but I finished this book!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

A fantastic collection. Wry and direct humour were my favourite aspects of this anthology.

The majority of the works, especially the fairy tales and short stories, are what cause to me to love Oscar Wilde.
The copy I own, a Wordsworth edition, contains many typos primarily in the play "The Duchess of Padua." At times I had no idea who was speaking.

In regards to the writing ability, he is one of the masters.

Okay, as recently, I'm mopping up some titles from "To Read Short Fiction Lists", genre and lit, and as I'm in the W's....

I had 3 pieces from Wilde on the list - I've previously read a *bit* of him (about 10 stories, mostly thanks to Dedalus Books Decadence series) but, for example, haven't tackled an obvious must-read like The Picture of Dorian Grey.

"Lord Arthur Savile's Crime" is probably the most "Wildean" thing here, and in it one can see Wilde's black humor and some origins of a writer like Saki (in one direction) and P.G. Wodehouse (in another). British upper crust life had advanced to such a point, seemingly, that one could be terribly naughty by writing a deliberately lighthearted piece about cold-blooded attempted murder, poison and anarchist bombs. Shocking! That may sound like I'm being sarcastic but actually I'm not, it's just interesting to me how levels of privilege, culture, comfort and stability (timed historically differently, of course, across varied social and class strata) invariably give rise to an impulse like this, a turning inward, a jaundiced view of the status quo, satirically and cheekily expressed. So here we have a society party of humorous cartoons (lots of witty bon mots tossed around - "The world is a stage but the play is poorly cast.") where a nobleman (Lord Savile, natch) has his palm read and is told he will commit murder in the future. Being a good upstanding chap, and not wanting to ruin his intended nuptials, he sets about trying to figure out who the least important person is that he can murder in his social circle. Hilarity ensues as poison, bombs and drownings prove ineffective until chance steps in. Of course, part of the joke is that Savile never questions (and we should never expect him to question) the accuracy of such a prediction from a dubious source, because then the ultimate joke of basing your actions on dubious sources, and the empty trendiness of the moneyed classes (and possibly their coldness to human suffering) would be undone.

"The Star Child" is Wilde operating in his Fairy Tale Mode. In many ways it is a traditional fairy tale with an obvious moral - a poor family finds an abandoned baby and raises him to be a beautiful boy. But the boy is cruel, arrogant and hateful and despises the poverty around him, torturing small animals and displaying his ingratitude at every opportunity, so magically he is turned ugly and has to go forth in the world to learn humility - which he does, by trying to complete three impossible tasks, aided by animal servitors. The Wildean punch, when it comes, lies not so much in the classically-beautiful-but-cruel main character but instead in the short and oddly ominous last line of the piece, as if Wilde could not completely commit himself to the eternal awe and wonder of happily ever after.

"The Decay Of Lying" is an essay (presented as a dialogue) and, honestly, I'll probably need to give it another read and dissect it at my leisure at a later date because I was mostly in the wrong head-space when I read it. Essentially, it's Wilde's barbed answer to the rise of the Naturalist/Realist movement in literature (Zola, etc.), which eschewed imagination and flights of fancy for close observations of the real world and people. Wilde believes this idea is terrible and sketches out what he believes literature (and almost almost all art) should consist of, how it should proceed and what its goals should be. Sui generis, inventive and imaginative, essentially - "effective lying" is the ultimate creativity.

Having recently codified my own approach to the arts (well, certainly literature) as that of a Generalist/Surveyor, I can't take an us/them, good/bad argument about literature *so* seriously. I find such screeds fascinating - not as an expression of "the truth" but as "one way of looking at things" (from a particular position, in a particular moment in time, given what has come before, what was happening then and what was to come) - even as my mind begins to undermine the argument (and, in case I haven't made my point, I'd have the same reaction to a po-faced essay about the obvious superiority of realism over imagination). These kind of essays/arguments *are* important - it *was* important that someone had them and they *remain* important as records of thought processes, as we try to move forward - except we don't seem to be moving forward very much and those records seem to be ignored, as we seem to JUST KEEP HAVING the same binary us/them, good/bad stupid/reductive arguments over and over again even centuries later (just recently, in my life in fact).

I do believe the human mind is vast and can hold many ideas, some of them contradictory. I do not think there is only one way to "do art" or that the term "art" is pretentious, or that "entertainment" is below contempt for that matter, OR that a perfect blending of "art" and "entertainment" is the Ultimate Goal for THAT matter. I do think that different approaches yield different results and have different successes, achievements, failures and traps. This doesn't seem very hard for me at all and I wonder why people seem so driven into singular conceptions - perhaps it's the varied arrogance and insecurity underlying the desperately clung-to worldviews? So, for example, when I read this essay I find it fascinating: Wilde is witty (duh), charming, intelligent and erudite and his argument makes sense - until I remember that some realist novels have, in my life, packed just as much impact as the imaginative ones. I look at what he's saying and think "hmmm, interesting that the Decadents take *part* of his stance - invention and artificiality - and discard others - by focusing on the dregs and degradation of real life". I think of genre writers who bristle at being labelled escapist and regularly chalk up straight Lit as "boring" - thus placing them in Wilde's camp - yet Wilde would be appalled to find them worrying over research, realistic detail and promoting social causes and the underrepresented.

But I'll have to reread it. There's a good argument to be made that Wilde is deliberately overstating his case so as to have a kind of unspoken criticisms of its excesses built right into the text. Still, lots of fun!

Does this need an introuduction?
These brilliant plays from the wordster geneous that is Oscar Wild. The importance of being Earnest is still my favorate and Dorian grey my least but there is no denying that Oscar Wilde is surely one to revisit over and over again.

"I remember having read somewhere, in some strange book, that when the gods wish to punish us they answer our prayers" (443).

I grazed thru this complete works visiting several stories and plays.

Oscar Fingal O’Flahertie Wills Wilde, the man that you are.

I actually can't believe I have now read almost everything by Oscar Wilde, a writer that I already admired so much from only having read The Picture of Dorian Gray. Now I can appreciate the full scope of his ingenious writing, his sarcastic humour and witty remarks. It's a tragedy he died believing his name would be a sham for generations to come, that for hundreds of years his works wouldn't be read, that he would stand for nothing but shame and perversion; an utter disgust to the society that couldn't stand people like him. I wish I could tell him how wrong he was and that he is still one of the most read authors of our time. More importantly, he’s personally my pookie bear.

The edition I read was fully illustrated and I think that enhanced my reading experience, so a short thank you to all talented artists that contributed to this book!

I will provide individual ratings for each parts of the collection because I'm that bastard.

n  The Picture of Dorian Grayn is probably one of my favourite books ever. It changed me from the moment that I read it, and I'm not even being dramatic, but the complex themes of morality and psychology in regard to human nature, combined with Wilde's exemplary writing, couldn't help but change something in my brain chemistry.
5 ★ The Picture of Dorian Gray

STORIES
5 ★ The Happy Prince
4 ★ The Nightingale and the Rose
3.5 ★ The Selfish Giant
4 ★ The Devoted Friend
2 ★ The Remarkable Rocket

4 ★ Lord Arthur Savile's Crime
5 ★ The Model Millionaire
3 ★ The Sphinx without a Secret
4.5 ★ The Canterville Ghost

3 ★ The Young King
2 ★ The Birthday of the Infanta
4 ★ The Star-Child

PLAYS
3 ★ Lady Windermere's Fan
3.5 ★ A Woman of No Importance
4 ★ An Ideal Husband
5 ★ The Importance of Being Earnest — if you would read any play by Oscar Wilde it should be this one; brilliant characterisation, shows Wilde’s fantastic ability dabbling comedy and critique of the privileged in a satirical way, and of course his wonderful writing in of itself.
3.5 ★ A Florentine Tragedy
2 ★ La Sainte Courtisane

COLLECTED POEMS
I am usually not one for poetry and only read poems if it is absolutely neccessary but I felt needed to give Wilde's a chance, especially since they are of his earliest work, when he was, whom I like to regard as, Baby-Wilde. With most poetry, I liked a few and disliked a few, and even loved a few of his poems. Some of them I found were deeply profound and others over-dramatic or shallow. And too many of them I found reminding me of my crush *sigh*.

Here are two of my favourites:

Silentium Amoris

As often-times the too resplendent sun
Hurries the pallid and reluctant moon
Back to her sombre cave, ere she hath won
A single ballad from the nightingale,
So doth thy Beauty make my lips to fail,
And all my sweetest singing out of tune.

And as at dawn across the level mead
On wings impetuous some wind will come,
And with its too harsh kisses break the reed
Which was its only instrument of song,
So my too stormy passions work me wrong,
And for excess of Love my Love is dumb.

But surely unto Thee mine eyes did show
Why I am silent, and my lute unstrung;
Else it were better we should part, and go,
Thou to some lips of sweeter melody,
And I to nurse the barren memory
Of unkissed kisses, and songs never sung.

and

Extract from Her Voice

And there is nothing left to do
But to kiss once again, and part
Nay, there is nothing we should rue,
I have my beauty, — you your Art,
tNay, do not start,
One world was not enough for two
tLike me and you.

I fucking loathe love (I am only miserable in my suffering so don't heed my words too much aight).

Oscar Wilde created some beautiful, heart wrenching and witty pieces of literature. One of his many many works will surely touch you. De Prefundis and The Picture of Dorian Gray are two pieces I come back to over and over again, since I first read them when I was 16.

A must-have for every lover of literature. Oscar Wilde is a writer like no other. His words speak directly to one's heart, their soul, their subconsciousness.. He changed the way I understood writing and reading entirely, made me fall in love with his every word and get lost in his ideas, his thoughts, his world.

I was 13 or 14 when I first picked up a paperback copy of his complete works on a whim. I remember feeling a little doubtful for buying such an expensive book from an author I had never heard of before. Needless to say, I'm so glad I did. It's a book to read, adore, and re-read a thousand times.

The Master

Wild, wilde and more wild. After TIOBE and Picture of Dorian Gray, I wanted more. Now with the short stories consumed too, what do I have left?

"The burden of this world is too great for one man to bear, and the world's sorrow too heavy for one heart to suffer."