Product Description

A new collection of stories from A. S. Byatt is always a winner, and this one takes an unexpected turn, bringing shivers as well as delights. Leaves rustle underfoot in a dark wood: two middle-aged women walk into a forest, as they did when they were girls, confronting their fears and memories and the strange thing they saw in their childhood - or thought they saw - so long ago. A distinguished obstetrician and young woman artist find they have sharply contrasting ideas about body parts, birth and death; an innocent member of an evening class harbours unexpected view on 'raw material'-The stories in this marvellous collection are by turns funny, spooky, sparkling and haunting. The Little Black Book of Stories holds its secrets, adding a dark quality to Byatt's famous skill in mixing folk and fairy tale with everyday life.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #22729 in Books
• Published on: 2004-11-04
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 240 pages

About the Author
A. S. Byatt is internationally acclaimed as a novelist, short story writer and critic. Educated at York and Newnham College, Cambridge, she taught at the Central School of Art and Design, and was Senior lecturer in English at University College, London, before becoming a full-time writer in 1983. She was appointed CBE in 1990 and DBE in 1999. Her most recent novel is A Whistling Woman, the conclusion of the famous 'Frederica' quartet.

Excerpted from The Little Black Book of Stories by A.S. Byatt. Copyright © 2003. Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
The Thing in the Forest

There were once two little girls who saw, or believed they saw, a thing in a forest. The two little girls were evacuees, who had been sent away from the city by train, with a large number of other children. They all had their names attached to their coats with safety-pins, and they carried little bags or satchels and the regulation gas-mask…The two girls had not met before, and made friends on the train. They shared a square of chocolate and took alternate bites of an apple. Their names were Peggy and Primrose…Neither of them knew where they were going, nor how long the journey might take. They did not know even why they were going, since neither of their mothers had quite known how to explain the danger to them. How do you say to your child, I am sending you away, because enemy bombs may fall out of the sky, because the streets of the city may burn like forest fires of brick and timber, but I myself am staying here, in what I believe may be daily danger of burning, burying alive, gas, and ultimately perhaps a grey army rolling in on tanks over the suburbs, or sailing its submarines up our river, all guns blazing?
So the mothers (who did not resemble each other at all) behaved alike, and explained nothing, it was easier. Their daughters they knew were little girls, who would not be able to understand or imagine.

Customer Reviews

Fantastic!
In these five short stories Byatt once again displays her talent for making the magical out of the mundane. Byatt takes a simple cloth and embroiders it until she has a tale woven richly with mythology and allegory, and strung with references classical and modern, literary and popular. Her well-structured stories are deceptively simple. You close the book feeling satisfied but something draws you back. When you look again, the focus of the stories seem to have shifted slightly and the different facets become apparent.

In The Thing in the Forest we discover that when something terrible happens to us at a young age it can become both more real and less real than anything else in our lives. The memory of the thing begins to mould the person we become and continues to shape our actions as an adult until, for better or worse, it leads us back to the source of our terror. " 'Sometimes I think that thing finished me off,' said Penny to Primrose".

Body Art takes us to that crossroads where modern art meets the base realities of the human body and science has to contend with human emotion.

A Stone Woman is about grief and transformation: a beautifully crafted fairytale, vibrant with colour and texture, with a setting that moves from the landscape of the flesh to the landscape of Norse mythology.

"There was fresh blood on the forget-me-nots and primroses in the carpet. It was not nice." Raw Material is about words. Why do we consider some subjects more worthy of our creative attention than others? Should creative writing be therapeutic? And what precisely is 'Real writing'? Set (as is much of Byatt's work) in a literary environment, where a lacklustre lecturer discusses these issues with the unmemorable members of his creative writing class, this story winds its way to a surprising end.

The Pink Ribbon takes us into the world of poor mad Mado and her suffering husband and carer James. When one day a beautiful young woman knocks on their door begging for sanctuary, James begins to feel that she knows a little too much about them both...

Lose yourself in Byatt's imagery
Of the stories in this book, the best, in my opinion, is the Stone Woman. It is an odd, captivating story. Byatt's meticulous, evocative descriptions of the properties of different stones turns the disquieting image of the woman's transformation into something beautiful and strangely natural. This tale feels almost like folklore or a fairy tale by the end.

The other stories in this collection not as enchanting, although I would have happily bought this for the Stone Woman alone.