Here are tales, fantasies, horror and satire, and character studies created with careful choice of words, sentences, and paragraphs to produce a specific effect on the reader. Some of the major themes of these short stories are human alienation, personal trauma, such as anxiety, love and hate, man-woman relationship, delusion and self-discovery, spiritual struggle, the individual in conflict with popular social values. The plot and structure, and the choice and control of style, which we notice in the short stories selected for The Color Gallery, will certainly stimulate our imaginative, emotional, and intellectual response. These unique and excellent short stories very well blend 'the native tradition with Continental sources', and revive the almost lost art of short-story writing. The intensity of The Color Gallery is beyond question, due to genuine emotional depth, the freshness, and direct presentation of situations.
We find in the short stories included in The Color Gallery an extraordinary quality of characterization, dialogue and situation. Several of these stories reveal the tense moments leading to an apt climax. The violence appearing as predominant theme in some short-story writers is not surprising, because our planet is now almost accustomed to the sinister storms of terror, nuclear war, moral and sexual depravity in all walks of life. In a few stories of The Color Gallery, we find the authors demanding freedom not of principles but of instincts, a freedom to live in 'a lawless universe where the only master is the inordinate energy of desire' (Albert Camus, The Rebel). The Color Gallery features short stories, which are 'charmingly unexpected, and unexpectedly charming'. What is extraordinary is that these authors are at the peak of their style-unpolished, vigorous, terse and suggestive.
In several stories, we notice the use of satire, but it is a gentle criticism of contemporary life and manners, devoid of any contempt or malice against any one in particular. A highly sensitive mind lays these authors open to all the emotions of the heart, and they are quite successful in describing the involvements, feelings, and characters of contemporary life.
The short stories selected for The Color Gallery present a many-sided picture of life, not only rose-colored but also the villainy and shallowness of contemporary life. It is especially significant that these authors penetrate to the very heart of the characters, and paint reality in all its contrasts.
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