The Complete Short Stories: Volume One

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Dahl's short stories are known for their unexpected endings, and his children's books for their unsentimental, macabre, often darkly comic mood, featuring villainous adult enemies of the child characters. [10] [11] His children's books champion the kindhearted and feature an underlying warm sentiment. [12] [13] His works for children include James and the Giant Peach, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Matilda, The Witches, Fantastic Mr Fox, The BFG, The Twits, George's Marvellous Medicine and Danny, the Champion of the World. His works for older audiences include the short story collections Tales of the Unexpected and The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar and Six More. Best Known For: Children's author Roald Dahl wrote the kids' classics 'Charlie and the Chocolate Factory,' 'Matilda' and 'James and the Giant Peach,' among other famous works.

Notable Quote: “Above all, watch with glittering eyes the whole world around you because the greatest secrets are always hidden in the most unlikely places. Those who don't believe in magic will never find it.” low over the field at midday we saw to our astonishment a bunch of girls in brightly coloured cotton dresses standing out by the planes with glasses in their hands having drinks with the French pilots, and I remember seeing bottles of wine standing on the wing of one of the planes as we went swooshing over. It was a Sunday morning and the Frenchmen were evidently entertaining their girlfriends and showing off their aircraft to them, which was a very French thing to do in the middle of a war at a front-line aerodrome. Every one of us held our fire on that first pass over the flying field and it was wonderfully comical to see the girls all dropping their wine glasses and galloping in their high heels for the door of the nearest building. We went round again, but this time we were no longer a surprise and they were ready for us with their ground defences, and I am afraid that our chivalry resulted in damage to several of our Hurricanes, including my own. But we destroyed five of their planes on the ground. [64] Of his early writing career, Dahl told New York Times book reviewer Willa Petschek, "As I went on the stories became less and less realistic and more fantastic." He went on to describe his foray into writing as a "pure fluke," saying, "Without being asked to, I doubt if I'd ever have thought to do it."

3. Taste

Spivey, Madeline (2020). "Roald Dahl and the Construction of Childhood: Writing the Child as Other". The Oswald Review. Perfect for little playwrights; Roald Dahl The Plays is a bookset of 7 books for kids aged 7+. A fabulous set of seven plays, adapted from the works of Roald Dahl; this set will introduce the world of theatre to young minds. They will love reading scripts aloud to family and friends; maybe whilst also enacting them as skits and plays. A UK television special titled Roald Dahl's Revolting Rule Book which was hosted by Richard E. Grant and aired on 22 September 2007, commemorated Dahl's 90th birthday and also celebrated his impact as a children's author in popular culture. [131] It also featured eight main rules he applied on all his children's books: The dreaded headmaster who succeeded Fisher and who made the lives of so many Repton pupils a misery was J. T. Christie who, according to the philosopher, Richard Wollheim, “rejoiced in beating boys” (he moved on to Westminster in 1937). If Dahl mixed up these two men, then how many of the other ‘facts’ in his two volumes of memoirs can be trusted? Much is clarified in Treglown’s book. Dahl was also influenced by Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. The "Drink Me" episode in Alice inspired a scene in Dahl's George's Marvellous Medicine where a tyrannical grandmother drinks a potion and is blown up to the size of a farmhouse. [139] Finding too many distractions in his house, Dahl remembered the poet Dylan Thomas had found a peaceful shed to write in close to home. Dahl travelled to visit Thomas's hut in Carmarthenshire, Wales in the 1950s and, after taking a look inside, decided to make a replica of it to write in. [140] Appearing on BBC Radio 4's Desert Island Discs in October 1979, Dahl named Thomas "the greatest poet of our time", and as one of his eight chosen records selected Thomas's reading of his poem " Fern Hill". [141]

Dahl died, in Oxford, England, in 1990, at the age of seventy-four, and this September marks the centennial of his birth, in Cardiff, Wales. More than two hundred million copies of his books are in print, and they have inspired countless adaptations, most recently the Steven Spielberg film “The BFG,” based on Dahl’s 1982 book of the same name, about an orphan girl named Sophie—bad fortune, complete with adversarial adults and minders, is a staple of his writing for young readers—who, one night, witnesses the BFG, or “big friendly giant,” of the title, blowing dreams into the windows of sleeping children. This is among my favorite Dahl books, in part because of the giant’s idiosyncratic language (he likes a drink called “frobscottle,” which causes flatulence, or “whizpopping”) and in part because I used to read it to my daughter, also named Sophie, when she was small. This suggests something, I think, about why his work for children lingers: a whisper of nostalgia, a bit of history, personal or otherwise. Still, as Dahl also understands, nostalgia only goes so far, for childhood is a passing phase. “I’m wondering what to read next,” Matilda, another one of his beloved title characters, says, as if to make such an idea explicit. “I’ve finished all the children’s books.” Roald Dahl was born in 1916 at Villa Marie, Fairwater Road, in Llandaff, Cardiff, Wales, to Norwegians Harald Dahl (1863–1920) and Sofie Magdalene Dahl ( née Hesselberg) (1885–1967). [14] [15] Dahl's father, a wealthy shipbroker and self-made man, had emigrated to the UK from Sarpsborg in Norway and settled in Cardiff in the 1880s with his first wife, Frenchwoman Marie Beaurin-Gresser. They had two children together (Ellen Marguerite and Louis) before her death in 1907. [16] Roald Dahl's mother belonged to a well-established Norwegian family of lawyers, priests in the state church and wealthy merchants and estate owners, and emigrated to the UK when she married his father in 1911. Dahl was named after Norwegian polar explorer Roald Amundsen. [17] His first language was Norwegian, which he spoke at home with his parents and his sisters Astri, Alfhild, and Else. The children were raised in Norway's Lutheran state church, the Church of Norway, and were baptised at the Norwegian Church, Cardiff. [18] His maternal grandmother Ellen Wallace was a granddaughter of the member of parliament Georg Wallace and a descendant of an early 18th-century Scottish immigrant to Norway. [19] After Neal suffered from multiple brain hemorrhages in the mid-1960s, Dahl stood by her through her long recovery. The couple would eventually divorce in 1983. Soon after, Dahl married Felicity Ann Crosland, his partner until his death in 1990. Death Receiving the 1983 World Fantasy Award for Life Achievement, Dahl encouraged his children and his readers to let their imagination run free. His daughter Lucy stated "his spirit was so large and so big he taught us to believe in magic." [76] She said her father later told her that if they had simply said goodnight after a bedtime story, he assumed it wasn't a good idea. But if they begged him to continue, he knew he was on to something, and the story would sometimes turn into a book. [128] Dahl was rescued and taken to a first-aid post in Mersa Matruh, where he regained consciousness, but not his sight. He was transported by train to the Royal Navy hospital in Alexandria. There he fell in and out of love with a nurse, Mary Welland. An RAF inquiry into the crash revealed that the location to which he had been told to fly was completely wrong, and he had mistakenly been sent instead into the no man's land between the Allied and Italian forces. [61] A Hawker Hurricane Mk 1, the aircraft type in which Dahl engaged in aerial combat over Greece

Swinebuggling stuff

The BFG was first made into a stop-motion animated film in 1989, with David Jason playing the voice of the Big Friendly Giant. The movie was remade in 2016 by Steven Spielberg and featured live actors. 'The Witches' (1990) It goes without saying that Roald Dahl’s impressive repertoire of children’s books are classics. Road Dahl books are arguably some of the most widely recognized by both children and adults alike. Dahl wrote several television and movie scripts. Several film adaptations of his books have also been created (all of those made during his lifetime Dahl famously despised), most notably: 'Willie Wonka and the Chocolate Factory' (1971) After the Third World War (and before the all-destroying Fourth), an underground kingdom is whimsically ruled over by the leader of the Gremlins, who alternately bullies his subjects and appeases them with sweet fruits called snozzberries. Their misogyny (“the female of any type is always more scheming, cunning, jealous and relentless than the male”) anticipates that of many of Dahl’s later stories.

Beginning with ‘The Last Act’, Dahl then wrote some violently erotic stories, all of which were published in Playboy (they were too spicy for the New Yorker!). Most of these take a dark, rather Gothic view of sex: in ‘The Visitor’, for instance, Uncle Oswald, discovers that he may have slept with a leper, while ‘Bitch’ ends with him being assaulted by a hideous woman to whom he has administered a powerful aphrodisiac. These three stories — along with one other, ‘The Great Switcheroo’, in which two men devise a plan for going to bed with each others wives without the women realising — make up Dahl’s fourth collection, Switch Bitch, published in both Britain (Michael Joseph) and America (Knopf) in 1974. Chantal Sophia "Tessa" (born 1957), who became an author, and mother of author, cookbook writer and former model Sophie Dahl (after whom Sophie in The BFG is named); [83] Of the films that were adapted from his books during his lifetime, Roald Dahl came to despise them. Danny DeVito directed this movie adaptation and also voiced the narrator. 'The Fantastic Mr. Fox' (2009) Many of Roald Dahl’s ideas were inspired by his childhood days and later experience. For example, in his autobiographical book Boy, Dahl says his school used to taste-test Cadbury’s chocolate. This led to the invention of the famous Willy Wonka and his chocolate factory. He also wrote about his experiences in the war, including in the book Going Solo. These years also inspired Dahl’s first book, The Gremlins. Pilots used to describe the malfunctions in their planes as little folkloric creatures causing havoc. These creatures made it into his first two novels, both published in the 40s, and an aborted Disney film.

6. Pig

Roald Dahl’s last long story follows the adventures of a genius five-year-old girl, Matilda Wormwood, who uses her powers to help her beloved teacher outwit the cruel headmistress. Movies Dahl was born in Llandaff, South Wales, on September 13, 1916. Dahl's parents were Norwegian. As a child, he spent his summer vacations visiting with his grandparents in Oslo. When Dahl was four years old, his father died. This Dahl favorite, originally known as Charlie and the Chocolate Factory as a book, starred Gene Wilder as Willy Wonka. An originally titled remake of the film, starring Johnny Depp, was released in 2005. 'The BFG' (1989, 2016) Dahl was born in Wales to affluent Norwegian immigrant parents, and spent most of his life in England. He served in the Royal Air Force (RAF) during the Second World War. He became a fighter pilot and, subsequently, an intelligence officer, rising to the rank of acting wing commander. He rose to prominence as a writer in the 1940s with works for children and for adults, and he became one of the world's best-selling authors. [6] [7] His awards for contribution to literature include the 1983 World Fantasy Award for Life Achievement and the British Book Awards' Children's Author of the Year in 1990. In 2008, The Times placed Dahl 16th on its list of "The 50 Greatest British Writers Since 1945". [8] In 2021, Forbes ranked him the top-earning dead celebrity. [9] The publication of My Uncle Oswald in 1979 — exactly thirty years after his only other attempt at along work of fiction, Sometime Never— finally proved to the world that Dahl was incapable of writing a successful novel for adults.

Oxford University Press to capture Roald Dahl's naughtiest language for the first time: World Book Day!". Cardiff Times. 7 March 2019.Arguably the Shakespeare of children's literature, from Fantastic Mr Fox to Matilda and The BFG, filmmakers and animators are still drawing from the enormous vat of material he created." The stories have been criticised for their cruel and misogynistic elements. The central conceit of "The Last Act", in particular, has been described by Jeremy Treglown, Dahl's biographer, as having "no purpose as a mechanism other than to lead to a crudely sensationalist conclusion", [2] and by British novelist Zoe Heller as describing "in obscene detail the rape of a menopausal woman by a gynecologist." [3] In the same article for The New Republic she commented generally on Dahl's later adult stories: "the sexual sadism is at its crudest and the 'wit' at its most vestigial... [they] are almost unbearable to read." His next school, Repton, was equally distasteful to him. In Boy: Tales of Childhood (Cape, 1984), and also in several TV interviews, Dahl represented the headmaster, Godfrey Fisher (who later became Archbishop of Canterbury and crowned Queen Elizabeth II), as a sadistic flogger, but Jeremy Treglown proves clearly that Fisher had, in fact left Repton a year before the beatings described in Boy. He wrote the script for a film that began filming but was abandoned, Death, Where is Thy Sting-a-ling-ling?. [137] Influences Interior of Dylan Thomas's writing shed. Dahl made a replica of it in his own garden in Great Missenden where he wrote many of his stories