Generally Good Stories, Some are Great

This is a selection of short stories about the California Salinas Valley. The collection includes The Chrysanthemums, The White Quail, Flight, The Snake, Breakfast, The Raid, The Harness, The Vigilante, Johnny Bear, The Red Pony, The Murder, and Saint Katy the Virgin. These stories all have at least a touch of the darkness common to much of Steinbeck’s work, yet almost all of the stories have a strange, subtle and almost mystical power. These stories are generally good, some are great, some are OK. I really liked the voice and tone of the stories and the narration was excellent. This collection pairs very nicely with The Pastures of Heaven.

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23 personnes ont trouvé cela utile

includes The Red Pony stories

This one is difficult to review. I am a huge fan of Steinbeck -- he is my favorite author, by far. But I am not really a fan of short stories, making this book a hard one to assess for me. I found some of these stories wonderful and rich. I had previously read The Red Pony, and I find it a smart, sweet, emotional tale in the vein of The Yearling by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings. I also loved Flight, which had the perfect Steinbeckian ending. Truthfully, I hated The Snake, but that is an anomaly.

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5 personnes ont trouvé cela utile

GREAT

What did you love best about The Long Valley?

The varied stories

If you’ve listened to books by John Steinbeck and John H. Timmerman (Introduction) before, how does this one compare?

good as always

What about Holter Graham’s performance did you like?

his voice

If you were to make a film of this book, what would the tag line be?

unanswered questions

Any additional comments?

the stories ended sp abruptly that I was into the next before I knew it. I did not like that I had no time to process what I had just heard

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I am struck by this man’s genius, again.

A beautiful collection of short and not so short stories.
Some stories made me laugh aloud, like st. Katherine the virgin. The red pony however is a timeless masterpiece of human literature.

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3 personnes ont trouvé cela utile

I dwell in Steinbeck Country

I hold Steinbeck's stories of the Salinas Valley and Monterey Peninsula closer to the vest, almost like The Book of Common Prayer for the Episcopalian, pulling from the text at each new, or rereading, something deeply personal while equally universal.
Steinbeck loved and knew this area; with a profound reverence for its deep, rich earth and its history. He honed a keen observation of human interaction with nature, the hard-edged man, and indefinable woman, and loved most dearly the 'lost souls' among us, living on the fringe of town...looking in.
It is in the telling of these seemingly simple stories, I find some of the most profound tales of human nature, man against nature, and his ultimate relationship with God, often embattled on the page and most eloquently argued with only a single character--on the mountaintops, in a terrifying grove, or on a railcar.

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Paul Sacramento

Excellent short stories. Wonderful narration. Absolutely loved every minute of this book. I will definitely read or listen it again.

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great narration to an excellent story

the narrator did an amazing job of capturing different characters without detracting from the story.

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Very good

Very good. He’s a great writer. I listened to almost all of his novels. This is a good one.

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Disappointed

I enjoyed The Red Pony however the short stories disappointed primarily because Steinbeck does such a great job of building an engaging story in his longer works. I didn’t find most of the short stories gripping and the and it was difficult to develop an emotional connection with the characters.

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Off the mark. Not what I expected

Just not what I expected. To many different scenarios to understand. Not as captive as most Steinbeck novels

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