Skip to content

Plain Tales from the Hills

Plain Tales from the Hills

Plain Tales from the Hills

Plain Tales from the Hills

by Rudyard Kipling

  • New
  • Paperback
Condition
New
ISBN 10
0141442395
ISBN 13
9780141442396
Seller
Seller rating:
This seller has earned a 5 of 5 Stars rating from Biblio customers.
Southport, Merseyside, United Kingdom
3 Copies Available from This Seller
(You can add more at checkout.)
Item Price
SGD 26.47
Or just SGD 23.82 with a
Bibliophiles Club Membership
SGD 17.14 Shipping to USA
Standard delivery: 14 to 21 days

More Shipping Options

Payment Methods Accepted

  • Visa
  • Mastercard
  • American Express
  • Discover
  • PayPal

About This Item

Paperback / softback. New. A collection of short stories, including "Lispeth", "Beyond the Pale" and "In the Pride of His Youth".

Synopsis

Originally written for the Lahore Civil and Military Gazette, the stories were intended for a provincial readership familiar with the pleasures and miseries of colonial life. For the subsequent English edition, Kipling revised the tales so as to recreate as vividly as possible the sights and smells of India for those at home. Yet far from being a celebration of Empire, Kipling's stories tell of 'heat and bewilderment and wasted effort and broken faith'. He writes brilliantly and hauntingly about the barriers between the races, the classes and the sexes; and about innocence, not transformed into experience but implacably crushed.

Reviews

On Jul 9 2011, Feeney said:
Rudyard Kipling was 32 when his first collection of short stories, PLAIN TALES FROM THE HILLS, was published in 1888. He had first issued 28 of them in the pages of his Anglo-Indian employer, The Civil and Military Gazette of Lahore, India (1886-7). *** The 40 short stories are of high quality and soon won for the young author a readership in India, Britain and America that propelled him to the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1907. Most of the characters displayed are British (including Irish) men, women and children. The men are often young Lieutenants (Subalterns) or enlisted men just assigned to a British or Native regiment in Queen Victoria's India. Less often the men are in business or are civil servants, married or not, assigned to running a district of several hundred thousand natives or advising the rulers of Princely States. *** Romance is a major theme. Thus the tale, "The Strength of a Likeness," begins: "Next to a requited attachment, one of the most convenient things that a young man can carry about with him at the beginning of his career, is an unrequited attachment. It makes him feel important and businesslike, and blase, and cynical." A couple of pages later: 'Open and obvious devotion from any sort of man is always pleasant to any sort of woman." *** From April to October things are so hot in India's Plains that the officers and civilians send their womenfolk and children to cool Hill Stations at 6,000 feet or higher. Thus, Simla, in the Himalyan foothills, became the summer capital of British India. Kipling's newspaper sent him there to file reports. And he observed the going ons of Viceroys, Commanders in Chief, older women who delighted in wrapping subalterns around their fingers and natives interacting with their white rulers. *** PLAIN TALES FROM THE HILLS contain more than one excellent ghost story, premonitions of death, the trials of boredom, ill health (especially the threat of cholera and typhoid), career frustrations, barely understood relations with the Hindus and Muslims being ruled and miitary and spying adventures in Burma and Afghanistan. *** In my own reading experience and judgment, a dozen or more of the PLAIN TALES FROM THE HILLS deserve appearing in any anthology of the world's finest short stories. Read a few and see if you agree! -OOO-

(Log in or Create an Account first!)

You’re rating the book as a work, not the seller or the specific copy you purchased!

Details

Bookseller
The Saint Bookstore GB (GB)
Bookseller's Inventory #
A9780141442396
Title
Plain Tales from the Hills
Author
Rudyard Kipling
Format/Binding
Paperback / softback
Book Condition
New New
Quantity Available
3
Binding
Paperback
ISBN 10
0141442395
ISBN 13
9780141442396
Publisher
Penguin Classics
Place of Publication
London
This edition first published
2011-07

Terms of Sale

The Saint Bookstore

Refunds or Returns: A full refund of the price paid will be given if returned within 30 days in undamaged condition. If the product is faulty, we may send a replacement.

About the Seller

The Saint Bookstore

Seller rating:
This seller has earned a 5 of 5 Stars rating from Biblio customers.
Biblio member since 2018
Southport, Merseyside

About The Saint Bookstore

The Saint Bookstore specialises in hard to find titles & also offers delivery worldwide for reasonable rates.

Glossary

Some terminology that may be used in this description includes:

New
A new book is a book previously not circulated to a buyer. Although a new book is typically free of any faults or defects, "new"...

This Book’s Categories

tracking-