This eclectic collection of stories ranges from Dickens to Ballard and exhibits the capacious and often capricious nature of the English literary sensibility.
From Anthony Trollope, Charles Dickens, and Thomas Hardy, through Rudyard Kipling, H.G. Wells, D.H. Lawrence, and Virginia Woolf, right up to Graham Greene, J.G. Ballard, Angela Carter, Ian McEwan, and many others, The Oxford Book of English Short Stories encompasses comedy and tragedy, farce and delicacy, elegance and the grotesque. Edited by noted novelist A. S. Byatt, the thirty-seven stories gathered here range from social realism to surreal fantasy, from rural poverty to war-blitzed London, from tales of the supernatural to precise delineations of the mundane, all unified by Byatts demanding criteria that the works be both startling and satisfying, and if possible make the hairs on the neck prickle with excitement, aesthetic or narrative. For short story lovers and anyone unable to resist the enchantments of the English imagination, The Oxford Book of English Short Stories offers a wide array of unforgettable pleasures, now reissued with a fresh, contemporary feel.