This anthology is in many was a 'best of the best', containing gems from thirty-four of Britain's outstanding contemporary writers. It is a book to dip into, to read from cover to cover, to lend to friends and read again. It includes stories of love and crime, stories touched with comedy and the supernatural, stories set in London, Los Angeles, Bucharest and Tokyo. Above all, as you will discover, it satisfies Samuel Butler's anarchic pleasure principle: 'I should like to like Schumann's music better than I do; I daresay I could make myself like it better if I tried; but I do not like having to try to make myself like things; I like things that make me like them at once and no trying at all...'
Rushdie, Ishiguro, and Greene particularly knocked it out of the park. (Naturally.) If you wanted to know, Graham Greene can do more with four pages than most novelists can with forty, and Rushdie can do more with a sentence than most can with a book.
Reading updates
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1 August, 2009:
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1 August, 2009:
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