The Penguin Book of Modern British Short Stories

Sep 22, 2024 5:29 AM

Author:Malcolm Bradbury,Malcolm Bradbury

The Penguin Book of Modern British Short Stories, edited by novelist and critic Malcolm Bradbury, is a collection of the finest short stories from our best loved authors, includingSamuel Beckett, Graham Greene, William Golding, Kingsley Amis, Doris Lessing, Muriel Spark, J. G. Ballard, William Trevor, Ian McEwan, Martin Amis, Rose Tremain, Salman Rushdie, Graham Swift and Kazuo Ishiguro.

'The short story has become one of the major forms of modern literary expression - in some ways the most modern of them all.'

The story of the British short story since the Second World War is one of change and revolution and this powerful and moving collection brilliantly demonstrates the evolution of the form.

Containing thirty-four of the most widely regarded postwar British writers, it features tales of love and crime, comedy and the supernatural, the traditional as well as the experimental. This many-storied, many-splendored collection is a brilliant portrait of the generation of writers who have immediately influenced the brightest, sharpest and most intriguing writers who continue to emerge today.

Malcolm Bradbury was a novelist, critic, television dramatist and professor of American studies and creative writing. He was awarded the CBE in 1991 for his services to Literature and was knighted in the 2000 New Year's Honours List. He died in 2000.

Reviews

In M.R. James' stories, the ordinary tips over into an alternative existence that is just as believable

—— Guardian

An original and powerful storyteller.... A gnawing sense of unease, a steady accumulation of sounds, shadows and images finally meet in a single moment of sensational physical horror

—— Daily Telegraph

M R James, who ushered the ghost story into our century, is still quite simply the craftiest

—— Independent

M R James is quite simply the finest writer of ghost stories ever. They're always set in an academic context, about university chaps who find out very nasty things while they're researching. They uncork the wrong bottle, unearth the wrong papers, dig up the wrong place. . . James was provost of Eton and a fellow of Kings College, and the stories have this wonderful candlelit, academic atmosphere, surrounded by incredible nastiness. Tweedy, but unpleasant

—— Christopher Frayling

A master class in creepiness from the Edwardian-era Provost of King's College, Cambridge. James delivers brilliant atmospherics, gnawing disquiet and (above all) horrific denouements created by suggestion rather than ghoulish spectacle

—— Independent

'Whistle And I'll Come To You' is one of the best ghost stories that has ever been written... will haunt you to the marrow

—— Daily Express

Beautifully nuanced stories, realistic snapshots of modern Japan enclosed in a fictional world that is seemingly trivial, but loaded with portent

—— Independent

A really imaginative collection where all the stories are intertwined and mysterious in that Murakami way

—— Observer

Murakami's storytelling inspires intimacy. It's the particular kind of intimacy that can evolve between a reader and a book, unspoken and unexpected, familiar, satisfying, strange.

—— JANE MENDELSOHN , Village Voice

Even in the slipperiest of Mr Murakami's stories, pinpoints of detail flash out warm with life.

—— New York Times

Murakami is one of the best writers around.

—— Time Out

Murakami is a true original and yet in many ways he is also Franz Kafka's successor because he seems to have the intelligence to know what Kafka truly was - a comic writer.

—— Sunday Herald

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