The Complete Short Stories of Oscar Wilde

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This comprehensive collection showcases Oscar Wilde's brilliant storytelling skills and his amazing stylistic versatility, ranging from fairy tales and ghost stories to detective yarns and comedies of manners. It includes the complete texts of "The Happy Prince and Other Tales," "A House of Pomegranates," "Lord Arthur Savile's Crime and Other Stories," "Poems in Prose," and the critical essay "The Portrait of Mr. W. H."
Originally published in the late 1880s and early 1890s, these tales predate Wilde's fame as a dramatist. When he wrote them, he was best known among fashionable London society as a drawing-room raconteur. Many of the character types now familiar from his comedies first emerged in these stories, along with his gifted uses of parody, melodrama, paradox, and irony. Even more significantly, they reflect the author's preoccupation with opposites — idealistic love and desire, art and life, sincerity and artifice, innocence and sin, altruism and greed, and honesty and deceit — offering captivating expressions of the themes that dominated Wilde's life and thought.

208 pages, Paperback

First published January 1,1894

About the author

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Oscar Fingal O'Fflahertie Wills Wilde was an Irish poet and playwright. After writing in different forms throughout the 1880s, he became one of the most popular playwrights in London in the early 1890s. He is best remembered for his epigrams and plays, his novel The Picture of Dorian Gray, and his criminal conviction for gross indecency for homosexual acts.
Wilde's parents were Anglo-Irish intellectuals in Dublin. In his youth, Wilde learned to speak fluent French and German. At university, he read Greats; he demonstrated himself to be an exceptional classicist, first at Trinity College Dublin, then at Magdalen College, Oxford. He became associated with the emerging philosophy of aestheticism, led by two of his tutors, Walter Pater and John Ruskin. After university, Wilde moved to London into fashionable cultural and social circles.
Wilde tried his hand at various literary activities: he wrote a play, published a book of poems, lectured in the United States and Canada on "The English Renaissance" in art and interior decoration, and then returned to London where he lectured on his American travels and wrote reviews for various periodicals. Known for his biting wit, flamboyant dress and glittering conversational skill, Wilde became one of the best-known personalities of his day. At the turn of the 1890s, he refined his ideas about the supremacy of art in a series of dialogues and essays, and incorporated themes of decadence, duplicity, and beauty into what would be his only novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890). Wilde returned to drama, writing Salome (1891) in French while in Paris, but it was refused a licence for England due to an absolute prohibition on the portrayal of Biblical subjects on the English stage. Undiscouraged, Wilde produced four society comedies in the early 1890s, which made him one of the most successful playwrights of late-Victorian London.
At the height of his fame and success, while An Ideal Husband (1895) and The Importance of Being Earnest (1895) were still being performed in London, Wilde issued a civil writ against John Sholto Douglas, the 9th Marquess of Queensberry for criminal libel. The Marquess was the father of Wilde's lover, Lord Alfred Douglas. The libel hearings unearthed evidence that caused Wilde to drop his charges and led to his own arrest and criminal prosecution for gross indecency with other males. The jury was unable to reach a verdict and so a retrial was ordered. In the second trial Wilde was convicted and sentenced to two years' hard labour, the maximum penalty, and was jailed from 1895 to 1897. During his last year in prison he wrote De Profundis (published posthumously in abridged form in 1905), a long letter that discusses his spiritual journey through his trials and is a dark counterpoint to his earlier philosophy of pleasure. On the day of his release, he caught the overnight steamer to France, never to return to Britain or Ireland. In France and Italy, he wrote his last work, The Ballad of Reading Gaol (1898), a long poem commemorating the harsh rhythms of prison life.

Community Reviews

Rating(4.1 / 5.0, 100 votes)
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100 reviews All reviews
April 17,2025
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n  Sonra Kırlangıç yeniden uçup Mutlu Prens’in yanına döndü ve ona yaptığını anlattı. “Garip şey,” dedi, “içim sımsıcak, oysa hava ne kadar soğuk.”n

Ne kadar güzel öykü ve masallardı onlar öyle...
Bak bu böyle böyle yapmış, sen sakın yapma, hııı! gibi bir his uyandırmadan farkındalık yaratabilen bir özelliğe sahip.
n  “Nereyi seversen orası senin dünyandır,” diye atıldı, hüzünlü bir çarkıfelek; gençliğinde eski bir köknar kutuya bağlanmıştı; kalbi kırıktı ve bununla gurur duyardı. “Ama aşkın modası geçti artık, şairler öldürdü aşkı. Aşk hakkında o kadar çok şey yazdılar ki, kimse onlara inanmaz oldu; bence çok normal. Gerçek âşık acı çeker ve susar. Hatırlıyorum da, ben bir zamanlar... Ama artık önemi kalmadı. Sevda maziye karıştı.”n

En beğendiğim Vefalı Dost oldu.
April 17,2025
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Although, I prefer Wilde's plays over his stories, this is a splendid collection of Wilde's short fiction. The stories written for children are my most favourite ones. They all are brilliantly crafted and achingly sweet, ending on a rather melancholy note. As you would expect from children stories, they all contain some kind of moral lessons, most of them promoting Christian values of self-sacrifice, charity, love and friendship. Often I had my heart in my mouth whenever a beautiful phrase or scene would come up. E.g.

"'Death is a great price to pay for a red rose,' cried the Nightingale, 'and Life is very dear to all. It is pleasant to sit in the green wood, and to watch the Sun in his chariot of gold, and the Moon in her chariot of pearl. Sweet is the scent of the hawthorn, and sweet are the bluebells that hide in the valley, and the heather that blows on the hill. Yet Love is better than Life, and what is the heart of a bird compared to the heart of a man?'" (The Nightingale and the Rose)

or

"'I am going to House of Death. Death is the brother of Sleep, is he not?'

And he kissed the Happy Prince on the lips, and fell down dead at his feet." (The Happy Prince)

I've still got left to read few of Wilde's stories which he wrote for adults, though I didn't really relish The Portrait Of Mr W H. It had a promising beginning but it started to read like a monotonous literary essay on Shakespeare's sonnets, so I end up skimming through half of the story...


[I shall update my review later.]
April 17,2025
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বেড়ে লাগছে।
ওয়াইল্ডের একটা বৈশিষ্ট্য একটু প্রকট, আপনি সচরাচর পুরুষ চরিত্রের এত উদ্দীপক বর্ণনা পাবেন না, বিশেষত দৈহিক। ডোরিয়ান গ্রে-র ক্ষেত্রে এমনটা ছিলো, এখানেও দেখা গেছে বারবার।
কিন্তু আরো প্রকট বৈশিষ্ট্য, আমার মনে হয়েছে তার সৌন্দর্য্যবোধ। ইংরেজি যতখানি পড়েছি, ওয়াইল্ডের ভাষা আমার পড়া সেরাগুলির একটা হবে।
লর্ড আর্থার স্যাভিলের শেষ গল্প বাদে বাকী তিনখান, সুখী রাজকুমারের সব কয়টা, ডালিমবাড়ির মাঝের দুইটা, বিশেষ করে জন্মদিনেরটা অসাধারণ, অসাধারণ। শেষের পাঁচটা গদ্যকাব্য (গল্পই ত বোধ হলো), এরাও অসাধারণ ঠেকেছে আমার কাছে, দিব্যি।
অনেকের মরালিস্ট মনে হতে পারে। কিন্তু হলো না হয়। ভাষার কী কেরদানী রে বাবা। কী ঝঙ্কার!

এইখানে ওয়াইল্ড সাহেবের প্রায় সব লেখা পেলাম, পত্রাদি আর প্রবন্ধ বাদে, আগ্রহীরা ঘেটে দেখতে পারেন। আগ্রহী হন, ওয়াইল্ড ভালো।
April 17,2025
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Bir kaç hikayeyi gerçekten çok sevdim. Diğerleri ortalamaydi.
April 17,2025
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⭐⭐ bu değerlendirmenin sebebi yazar ve eseri değil yayınevi aymazlığıdır!

Yazara ve esere laf etmek haddime değil, zira büyüklere öyküler ve masallar kıvamındaki eser her hikayesi ile keyifle okunuyor. Ben storytelde dinleyenlerdenim... Bazı hikayelerde üzüldüğümü, bazılarında güldüğümü inkar edemem bu bağlamda sürükleyici ve keyifli bir eser diyebilirim...

Alfa Yayınları'na ise edecek iki çift lafım var.

Lord Arthur Savile'in Suçu hikayesinde

“Ona bakan biri Nemesis’in Pallas’ın kalkanını çaldığını ve ona Gorgon’un kafasını göstermiş olduğunu söyleyebilirdi.”


cümlesine istinaden eklenmiş olan çevirmen notunda yazanlar sıkıntılı. Hemen ilgili notu şuraya iliştireyim ve açıklayayım:

n  Nemesis: Antik Yunan Mitolojisi'nde tanrılara karşı böbürlenenleri cezalandıran tanrıça

Pallas: Antik Yunan Mitolojisinde deniz tanrısı Poseidon'un oğlu ve habercisi olan Triton'un kızı.

Gorgon: Antik Yunan Mitolojisi'nde bir canavar.
n


Nemesis için yapılan tanımlama sıkıntılı, Pallas için yapılmış olan çevirmen notu ise tamamen hatalı. Zira burada Pallas'ın kalkanı cümlesi ile ifade edilen Pallas Athena. Yani Zeus'un puhu gözlü kızı, savaşçı tanrıça :)

Buna istinaden yayınevine ve storytele sosyal medyadan yazdığım metne bir dönüş alamadım. Gözlerinden kaçmış olabilir diyerek mail atmayı düşünüyorum. Çevirmenin mitolojiye hakim olmadığını varsayarsak bunu editörün mutlaka yakalamış olması gerekirdi diye düşünüyorum.

Eserin İş Bankası Kültür Yayınları'ndan çıkan edisyonunda metin:

"Ona bakan biri Nemesis'in Pallas Athena'nın kalkanını çaldığını ve ona Gorgon'un yüzünü gösterdiğini düşünebilirdi."


şeklinde çevrilmiş ve bir dip/çevirmen notuna gerek duyulmamış. Bu hali ile ihtiyaç da kalmamış. okuyacaksanız İş Kültür'den çıkan edisyonu tercih edin.
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