The Penguin Book of Modern British Short Stories - Softcover

Various

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0140063064 ISBN 13: 9780140063066

Publisher: Penguin Books, 1989

Synopsis

Gathers stories by Lowry, Beckett, Bowen, Pritchett, Rhys, Golding, Amis, Lessing, Spark, Fowles, Ballard, and Weldon

About this title

About the Author:

Malcolm Bradbury is a novelist, critic, television dramatist and Emeritus Professor of American Studies at the University of East Anglia. He is author of the novels Eating People is Wrong (1959); Stepping Westward (1965); The History Man (1975); which won the Royal Society of Literature Heinemann Prize and was adapted as a famous television series; Rates of Exchange (1983) which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize; Cuts: A Very Short Novel (1987), also televised; and Doctor Criminale (1992). His critical works include The Modern American Novel (1984; revised edition, 1992); No, Not Bloomsbury (essays, 1987); The Modern world: Ten Great Writers (1988); From Puritanism to Post-modernism: A History of American Literature (with Richard Ruland, 1991) He is the author of a collection of seven stories and nine parodies, entitled Who Do You Think You Are? (1976), and of several works of humour and satire, including Why Come to Slaka? (1986), Unsent Letters (1988; revised edition, 1995) and Mensonge (1987). Many of his books are published by Penguin. In addition, he has written many television plays and the television 'novel' The Gravy Train and The Gravy Train Goes East. He has adapted several television series, including Tom Sharpe's Porterhouse Blue, Kinglsey Amis's The Green Man and Stella Gibbon's' Cold Comfort Farm, now a feature film.

Malcolm Bradbury lives in Norwich, travels good deal, and in 1991 he was awarded the CBE.

From Library Journal:

These 34 stories have all the hallmarks of post-1945 British culture: an amused attitude toward Americans and Australians, a comic fascination with sex, a baffling affection for a cold evening meal called "tea." In most cases, though, as the narrator of Adam Mars-Jones's "Structural Anthropology" says, "just below the surface of story . . . lies the tangled richness of myth." Stylistically, the works vary from Samuel Beckett's succinct avant-gardism to Doris Lessing's extended revisiting of naturalism a la Flaubert. The entire volume is recommended, especially Ian McEwan's "Psychopolis," which makes it clear why many consider him Great Britain's leading writer. David Kirby, Florida State Univ., Tallahassee
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Penguin Books
• Publication date: 1989
• ISBN 10: 0140063064
• ISBN 13: 9780140063066
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 448
• Editor: Bradbury Malcolm