Product Description

The Oxford Book of English Short Stories , edited by A. S. Byatt, herself the author of several collections of short stories, is the first anthology to specifically take the English short story as its theme. The 37 stories featured here are selected from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, ranging from Dickens, Trollope, and Hardy to J. G. Ballard, Angela Carter, and Ian McEwan, though many draw ingeniously from the richness of earlier English literary writing. There are all sorts of threads of connection and contrast running through these stories. Their subjects vary from the sublime to the ridiculous, from the momentous to the trivial, from the grim to the farcical. There is English empiricism, English pragmatism, English starkness, English humour, English satire, English dandyism, English horror, and English whimsy. There are examples of social realism, from rural poverty to blitzed London; ghost stories and tales of the supernatural; surreal fantasy and science fiction. There are stories of sensibility, precisely delineated, from Hardy's reluctant bride to the shocked heroine of Elizabeth Taylor's The Blush, from H. E. Bates's brilliant fusion of class, sex, death, and landscape, to D. H. Lawrence's exploration of a consciousness slowly detaching itself from its world. There are exuberant stories by Saki and Waugh, Wodehouse and Firbank, with a particularly English range from high irony to pure orchestrated farce. The very range and scope of the collection celebrates the eccentric differences and excellences of English short stories. Some of A. S. Byatt's choices clearly take their place in the grand tradition of story-telling, while others are more unusual. Many break all the rules of unity of tone and narrative, appearing to be one kind of story before unexpectedly turning into another. They pack together comedy and tragedy, farce and delicacy, elegance and the grotesque, with language as various as the subject matter. As A. S. Byatt explains: 'My only criterion was that those stories I selected should be startling and satisfying, and if possible make the hairs on the neck prickle with excitement, aesthetic or narrative'.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #21877 in Books
• Published on: 2009-03-19
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 472 pages

About the Author
A. S. Byatt is a novelist, essayist, broadcaster, and reviewer, and has taught at University College London. She won the Booker Prize for her novel Possession (1990), and her other books include Angels and Insects (1992), and Babel Tower (1996).

Customer Reviews

The most brilliant collection of short stories ever
This book is amongst the most entertaining books I have ever read. It contains a wide range of subjects and styles ranging from P. G. Wodehouse's "The Reverent Wooing Of Archibald" to "A Widow's Quilt" by Sylvia Townsend Warner. The book alows the reader to choose his or her story according to mood or prefernence and thus makes for a very good thing. It is the wide range of storie and authors in the book that really make it so great. A. S. Byatt has selected the choicest morcels of litterary brilliance and added them all into this great collection. Thoughly worth a read or two.