Inspired by Matisse paintings, these three splendid stories (two have appeared in the New Yorker) pay homage to the artist as they offer equally memorable verbal portraits of apparently ordinary lives driven by pain and disquiet.
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An ambitious, intelligent work that, while aiming to get Britain's swinging '60s down pat, unfortunately scants the usual fictional elements, putting in their place a mordant and always perceptive historical critique.
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Four short fairy tales with a contemporary edge, and one novella-length tale that brilliantly transforms a story of middle- age angst into a celebration of serendipity and sex.
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"An often enchanting further display of Byatt's fluent style and far-reaching imagination."
Six rather arbitrarily linked stories (which allegedly explore various "extremes and polarities") from the rococo stylist whose best fiction includes Booker Prize—winning Possession (1990) and the (rather similar) story collection The Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye (1997).
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"Not for Oprah's Book Club--but readers willing to be lectured will be suitably rewarded."
An academic who forsakes the realm of concepts and theories for the quotidian world of "things" is the unlikely--and quite likable--protagonist of Byatt's formidably learned latest, which echoes rather loudly her Booker Prize–winning Possession (1999).
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