The World and Other Places: Stories - Softcover

Winterson, Jeanette

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0676972551 ISBN 13: 9780676972559

Publisher: Vintage Canada, 2000

Synopsis

With language as dazzling as the wondrous visionary landscapes they evoke, these seventeen works transport the reader to worlds in which sleep is illegal, the lives of lonely department store clerks are transformed by fairies, the rich wear coal jewelry on an island of diamonds, and the living laminate their dead. Here is a universe where rooms go missing, women give birth to their lovers, and the young contemplate God's creative powers through pet tortoises.

About this title

Review

Her first short story collection exhibits the multitude of talents that have made English novelist Jeanette Winterson not just admired but beloved by her many fans. There are the surprising, fresh little phrases minted expressly to convey the delicate realities of the made-up world. There's the humor, fierce and sly but always kind. There's the imagination that changes gender and historical epoch at whim, and does so convincingly; and the characters themselves, a sundry bunch of men and women not necessarily successful or commendable but always, somehow, likable. Best of all, by their very diversity, these stories reveal glimpses of the smart and enigmatic woman behind the work.

In "Atlantic Crossing," Winterson becomes a middle-aged businessman of the mid-20th century, accidentally assigned to share his second-class cabin with a young black woman on a transatlantic crossing. In the realm of event, little happens, but in its depth of perception and what it tells of the nuances of regret, the story is as rich as a novel in another writer's hands. A few scant pages later, Winterson becomes a kind of lost female Homer, telling Orion's story from Artemis's point of view: "When she returned she saw this huge rag of a man eating her goat, raw.... His reputation hung about him like bad breath." In "The Poetics of Sex," she creates a lesbian love story that evokes her characters' personalities as explicitly as their erotic pleasures. "The 24-Hour Dog," the story of a woman writer returning a puppy she had thought to adopt, is remorseless as a psychological thriller in the squirmy depths it plumbs: "I had made every preparation, every calculation, except for those two essentials that could not be calculated: his heart and mine." Read The World and Other Places twice, once for instruction, once for joy. --Joyce Thompson

From the Back Cover

"A brilliant collection. . .speculative, philosophical and surreal. . . . You will fall in love with this writer." --The Baltimore Sun

"Winterson is a grand warrior. . .a modern writer, a modern thinker. . . . Her images are fantastic." --Los Angeles Times

"Like a literary periscope scanning island after island in the sea of Winterson's imagination." --Boston Book Review

"That Winterson is an original and important writer is surely by now beyond question. . . . One of the pleasures of this collection is that it allows the reader to map the gradual evolution of her writing." --The Boston Globe

About this edition

• Publisher: Vintage Canada
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 0676972551
• ISBN 13: 9780676972559
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 240