Additional Book Information
Series: NYRB Classics
ISBN: 9781590172889
Pages: 368
Publication Date: October 28, 2008
Don't Look NowStories
by Daphne du Maurier, selected and with an introduction by Patrick McGrath
An NYRB Classics Original
Daphne du Maurier wrote some of the most compelling and creepy novels of the twentieth century. In books like Rebecca, My Cousin Rachel, and Jamaica Inn she transformed the small dramas of everyday life—love, grief, jealousy—into the stuff of nightmares. Less known, though no less powerful, are her short stories, in which she gave free rein to her imagination in narratives of unflagging suspense.
Patrick McGrath's revelatory new selection of du Maurier's stories shows her at her most chilling and most psychologically astute: a dead child reappears in the alleyways of Venice; routine eye surgery reveals the beast within to a meek housewife; nature revolts against man's abuse by turning a benign species into an annihilating force; a dalliance with a beautiful stranger offers something more dangerous than a broken heart. McGrath draws on the whole of du Maurier's long career and includes surprising discoveries together with famous stories like "The Birds." Don't Look Now is a perfect introduction to a peerless storyteller.
These stories are included in the book.
Praise
Don't Look Now is a stunning collection of du Maurier's particular brand of intricately plotted story. The mesmerizing title story was faithfully adapted by Nicholas Roeg, and the volume also includes the creepily riveting tale The Birds,... filmed by Alfred Hitchcock.
— The Atlantic
Her tales of the macabre are among the best of their genre.
— Michael Dirda
Du Maurier served up more sinister fare than the Bronté's...
— The New York Times Book Review
That whooshing sound you hear is your mind being sucked into the brilliant black depths of Daphne du Maurier's Gothic imagination, the instant you begin reading the eponymous first story in Don't Look Now....Novelist Patrick McGrath's introduction reacquaints us with the intense, eccentric, psychologically deft du Maurier, a master storyteller with a touch as smooth as a raven's wing.
— O, the Oprah Magazine
This new collection of her macabre tales, which features many unavailable for years, is an ideal treat for Halloween.
— Thicket
[Du Maurier] was indeed a serious writer, a brilliant innovative practitioner of her craft, as these stories consistently demonstrate...Readers of these wonderful stories will go to places and feelings they never dreamed of—all because Daphne du Maurier possessed such an amazing imagination and such a capacity to make it all seem credible in her sturdy prose.
— Washington Times