Winters' Tales (Winter's Tales Third Series) - Hardcover

Baird-Smith, Robin

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0312000855 ISBN 13: 9780312000851

Publisher: St Martins Press, 1987

Synopsis

This collection of eleven short stories includes works by such distinguished authors as Jorge Luis Borges, James Chatto, Joyce Carol Oates, Muriel Spark, and Rose Tremain

About this title

From Kirkus Reviews

The seventh edition of this annual anthology--from Britain but with an international bent--features, often enough, refined mandarin prose and multilayered narratives that offer a marked contrast to American minimalism. With one exception, the fictions are original: the solicitation process is unclear, but the writers range from established (Clare Colvin, Laura Kalpakian, Piers Paul Read, Tom Wakefield) to emerging (Balraj Khanna, Tony Peake, Patrick Roscoe). Read's ``Family Christmas'' is a delicate slice-of-life about a wife who returns with her family, including her stiff husband (``just another irritable paterfamilias''), to her recently widowed mother's house. Colvin's ``The Archduke's Dwarf'' makes delightful use of historical and fairy-tale elements to meditate on the nature of love. In tragicomic fashion, Khanna, a transposed Indian, dramatizes (in ``The Last Card Game'') the domestic warfare between a husband who longs for the ``good old days in the Punjab'' and a wife whose maternal feelings have been displaced onto a terrier. Helen Harris's deft ``The Mirage'' is a sad tale about a woman who ``married modestly'' for ``a straight exchange,'' not love, before quarreling with her unloved husband and eventually drifting into loneliness. Scottish writer Alison Fell's ``Queen Christina and the Windsurfer'' is a lyrically playful encounter between goddesses and mortals, whereas ``Carpe Diem'' by Isidoro Blaisten (from Buenos Aires) is a clever anthology-ending bit of wordplay that punctuates this edition's commitment to the eclecticism of various keys both major and minor. While the overall quality of the 12 stories is mixed, the cosmopolitan tone and varied forms are satisfying. -- Copyright ©1991, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

From Publishers Weekly

The most powerful story in this popular annual gathering, Patrick Roscoe's "My Lover's Touch," probes the masochistic needs of a teenager who as a child was kept in solitary confinement by a kidnapper and brutally beaten. There are striking modern fables, such as Haydn Middleton's "The Conversion," about a traveling salesman whose wife moves into the hippie commune next door, and "The Interrogator's Divorce," Paul Sayer's conjuring of an imaginary (but all too familiar) terroristic police state. Joyce Carol Oates offers keen sociological analysis in "The Hair," a witty profile of two suburban couples' unbalanced friendship. Each story in this collection by an international group of English-speaking writers has a unique setting, from the ornate Parisian apartment featured in Clare Colvin's spine-tingling tale, "Something to Reflect On," to California's desert landscape in the 1940s, where Laura Kalpakian's disheveled townsfolk in "Right Hand Man" make their home. This outstanding anthology is, as usual, a delight, showcasing a galaxy of old and new talents.
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: St Martins Press
• Publication date: 1987
• ISBN 10: 0312000855
• ISBN 13: 9780312000851
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 224