The Oxford Book of English Short Stories Hardcover - 1998

From the publisher

"The subjects of these stories range from the sublime to the ridiculous, from the momentous to the trivial, from the grim to the farcical," writes acclaimed novelist A.S. Byatt in her introduction to this remarkable collection. Indeed, if the eccentricities of the English imagination can be
contained in a single volume, an anthology of short stories might be the best book for the task.
From Anthony Trollope, Charles Dickens, and Thomas Hardy through Rudyard Kipling, H.G. Wells, D.H. Lawrence, and Virginia Woolf, right up to Graham Greene, J.G. Ballard, Angela Carter, Ian McEwan, and many others, The Oxford Book of English Short Stories exhibits the capacious and often
capricious nature of the English literary sensibility. "There is English empiricism, English pragmatism, English starkness, English humour, English satire, English dandyism, English horror, and English whimsy," notes A.S. Byatt in surveying the stories she has selected. "There are characteristic
mixed modes which seem to go back further than Austen and Defoe to Chaucer and Shakespeare." Byatt shows us the links between stories, the literary currents that both connect and distinguish writers as diverse as Mary Mann, V.S. Pritchett, P.G. Wodehouse, Penelope Fitzgerald, and Alan Sillitoe. And
although the thirty-seven stories gathered here range from social realism to surreal fantasy, from rural poverty to war-blitzed London, from tales of the supernatural to precise delineations of the mundane, all are unified by Byatt's demanding criteria that the works be both "startling and
satisfying."
For short story lovers and anyone unable to resist the enchantments of the English imagination, The Oxford Book of Short Stories offers a wide array of unforgettable pleasures.

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