The Little Black Book of Stories FROM OUR EDITORS
The Barnes & Noble Review
This collection by master storyteller A. S. Byatt contains five adult fairy tales that are as dark as the title implies. From two young girls' encounter with a nightmarish myth to a woman slowly turning to stone, the stories represent Byatt at her very best. "The Thing in the Forest," set during the WWII London Blitz, follows a group of young girls as they're whisked away from the devastation to the temporary safety of a countryside mansion. Amid the chaos, two girls -- Penny and Primrose -- befriend one another and, being city dwellers, decide to investigate the surrounding forest the first chance they get. But their exploration leads them to a terrifying discovery. Years afterward, they meet again at the mansion as middle-aged women to face their fear, this time with very different results. Ideologies clash in "Body Art," where a lapsed Catholic doctor has a fling and impregnates an emotionally damaged art student who has a thing for body piercings. A young woman begins a beautiful and bizarre metamorphosis when she finds her beloved mother dead in the profoundly moving "A Stone Woman," and a creative writing teacher finds inspiration in the unlikeliest of places in "Raw Material." In "The Pink Ribbon" -- a tale about commitment, remorse, and Teletubbies! -- a retired professor struggles with his wife's dementia.
Fans of classic fairy tales by Hans Christian Andersen and the Brothers Grimm -- as well as short works by contemporary storytellers like Ray Bradbury and Stephen King -- will cherish this truly magical collection, which blurs the lines between dark fantasy and reality. Paul Goat Allen
FROM THE PUBLISHER
Little Black Book of Stories offers shivers along with magical thrills. Leaves rustle underfoot in a dark wood: two middle-aged women walk into a forest, as they did when they were girls, confronting their childhood fears and memories and the strange thing they saw - or thought they saw - so long ago. A distinguished male obstetrician and a young woman artist meet in a hospital, but they have very different ideas about body parts, birth, and death. A man meets the ghost of his living wife; a woman turns to stone. And an innocent member of an evening creative writing class turns out to have her own decided views on the best way to us "raw material."
FROM THE CRITICS
Claire Messud - The New York Times
Byatt has the sheer narrative skill to raise the hairs on the back of your neck and make your pulse race. In this fine and memorable collection, she attains a near perfect balance between low and high, body and mind, the Thing and its significance.
Publishers Weekly
From secret agonies to improper desires and the unthinkable, this slyly titled collection touches on more than a little bit of darkness. Booker Prize-winning author Byatt (Possession) masterfully fuses fantasy with realism in several of these stories, packing a punch with her sometimes witty, sometimes horrifying examinations of faith, art and memory. In the stunning "The Thing in the Wood," two young girls, Penny and Primrose, sent to the countryside during the WWII London blitz, confront the unconscious come to life as a monster ("its expression was neither wrath nor greed, but pure misery.... It was made of rank meat, and decaying vegetation"). They return in middle age to face the Thing again, but Penny, a psychotherapist, doesn't fare as well as Primrose, a children's storyteller. A lapsed Catholic gynecologist tries to rescue a starving artist in "Body Art," enacting what Byatt casts as the very obstructiveness of the Church he left behind. It's a chilling story that shines with grace. Byatt's modern-day fairy tale, "A Stone Woman," details a woman's metamorphosis from flesh to stone, which is both terrible and redemptive ("Jagged flakes of silica and nodes of basalt pushed her breasts upward and flourished under the fall of flesh"). In "Raw Material," a creative writing teacher finds inspiration in the work of an elderly student who comes to a gruesome end, the student's life and death imitating bad art very unlike her own. The haunting final story of the collection, "The Pink Ribbon," about a man who is more troubled by remembering than by forgetting as he cares for his Alzheimer's-addled wife, turns on the appearance of the ghost of the wife's former self. With an accomplished balance of quotidian detail and eloquent flights of imagination, Byatt has crafted a powerful new collection. Agent, Peter Matson. (May) Forecast: Gorgeously subdued jacket art, the coy title and Byatt's name should attract considerable browser traffic; expect sales to keep pace. Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.
Library Journal
Exiled from wartime London, two little girls think they see something monstrous in the forest, and when they meet again as middle-aged women (both slightly disdainful and slightly disappointed) they try to reconstruct the truth of their vision. A rather glum, self-righteous obstetrician, still struggling with the consequences of his lapsed Catholicism, encounters a waiflike young artist at his hospital and commences a quickie affair that lays bare just how different their values are. A novelist who hasn't amounted to much after his first success and now teaches a bargain-basement writing class encounters a much older woman who really can write. But when he goes to visit her after her first modest publishing success, he finds her horrifically murdered. Byatt demonstrates her formidable skill in this little collection of perfectly rendered pieces. The prose is arresting and memorable, the images linger, getting under your skin. But as a whole these stories are also a little cold-eyed and merciless. They are indeed "black," and some readers might even call them sour. For all literary collections, given Byatt's reputation, though this won't pull in as many readers as Possession. Barbara Hoffert, "Library Journal" Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.
Kirkus Reviews
With painstaking precision, Booker-winner Byatt (A Whistling Woman, 2002, etc.) analyzes the frailty, impermanence, and disturbing complexity of the human body. Otherworldly and folkloric motifs link this new collection of five stories with earlier similar volumes (e.g., Elementals, 1999), especially as seen in its opening tale, "The Thing in the Forest." This introduces two young girls, Penny and Primrose, WWII II refugees, who wander one day from the castle where they're housed in a forest clearing, where they glimpse a monstrous misshapen form. The "thing," seemingly "made of rank meat, . . . decaying vegetation, . . . [and] manmade materials," haunts their imaginations forever after: it's a powerful image of formative early fears that never leave us. "Body Art," which interestingly continues the theme of corporeal irregularity and fluidity, details the combative yet mutually sustaining relationship between an emotionally Spartan gynecologist and the female free spirit who provokes and reshapes his emotions. The capacity "to make familiar things look strange" strongly affects an underachieving novelist-writing teacher in "Raw Material." The breakdown of physical and intellectual form is movingly depicted in "The Pink Ribbon," in which a retired classics professor tends to his unreachable wife, a mad babbling shadow of her composed former self, and unknowingly invites into their lives the figure that will bring them both release, and peace. And in the superb centerpiece, "A Stone Woman," a survivor of life-threatening surgery undergoes a "metamorphosis" that takes her beyond her cramped personal world to the alluring landscape of Iceland ("where we are matter-of-fact about strangethings") and a strange, unforeseen and unimaginable liberation. It's as if Isak Dinesen had magically reappeared, to give us one more unclassifiable baroque masterpiece. Byatt has never written better than in these exquisite stories that, together and thus arranged, assume the shape of a life from childhood through old age and death. A stunning, altogether irresistible collection. Agency: Sterling Lord Literistic
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