Best English Short Stories V - Hardcover

The latest in this excellent annual series includes 25 stories that represent a much wider stylistic range than the average American anthology. Big names (Munro, Gordimer, Trevor, Weldon) contribute, but there are also many writers unknown on this side of the Atlantic and stories that have been heard only on the BBC. The ``Troubles'' in Ireland inspire a number of fine pieces here: Carlo Gebler's ``The Headscarf'' transforms a harmless trip to the beautician into an exercise in fear. In Bernard McLaverty's ``The Wake House,'' a Catholic widow forces her son to accompany her to a wake of a Protestant neighbor. And William Trevor's ``Lost Ground'' brilliantly spins on received ideas when a Protestant boy in Ulster publicly insists he was visited by a ``papist'' saint. Nadine Gordimer's ``Look-Alikes'' is a political allegory about the homeless people who appear on a university campus, and South African Christopher Hope provides a historical story of English servicemen whose families colonize a small development. Sex preoccupies many of the writers included here. In David Belbin's ``Different Ways of Getting Drunk,'' the female narrator finds happiness in a lesbian bar while continuing with her accountant boyfriend; and in Michelle Heinemann's ``Nana's Dance,'' a husband and wife separately seduce a voluptuous belly-dancer. Tony Musgrave's ``Bel'' is a young woman's post-coital monologue, and Geoff Nicholson's ``The Guitar and Other Animals'' concerns a woman who finds sexual fulfillment in her strange performance pieces. Jane Gardam's ``Bevis'' is a Hardyesque tale of a childhood romance that turns on a mistake in identity. Comic pieces range from Martin Amis's ``Career Move,'' a one-joke idea taken to its extreme, to Jonathan Treital's ``Stalin, Stalin, and Stalin,'' a surreal bit chronicling the declining fortunes of a group of Stalin doubles. Alice Munro's ``A Real Life'' is a beautiful story about an improbable marriage--surely the best thing here. Even the lesser stories take chances with subject or genre- -which makes for a truly exciting and surprising anthology. -- Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

It's somewhat of a stretch to call this fine collection of stories "English," since it includes work by certified Canadians, South Africans and Irish. English- language stories is what they are, though the editors admit in their pithy introduction that outlets for good stories are getting scarcer in the U.K. It's noteworthy, in fact, that four of the most effective of them made their initial appearance in the New Yorker more than a year ago and were therefore available first to an American readership: Martin Amis's edgily hilarious "Career Move," in which a poet and a screenwriter inhabit each other's worlds; Edna O'Brien's "Wilderness," a lacerating account of a mother's loss of her son in a freak accident; William Trevor's "Lost Ground," a magical story of faith, illusion and death in an Irish backwater; and Alice Munro's "A Real Life," one of her penetrating, wise and absurdist sketches of the oddities of life in rural Ontario. "West Wirral Story" by Michael Carson is a delightful and poignant portrait of an impossible mother-daughter relationship, originally written, like other stories here, for BBC radio. Jane Gardan's "Bevis," by another author new to the U.S., is a skillful cynical-romantic reminiscence with a brilliant surprise ending. Nadine Gordimer's "The Look-Alikes" is a telling, brief morality tale of university life in South Africa, and Carlo Gebler's "The Headscarf" is an equally brief anecdote about life in Northern Ireland that speaks volumes. There is not much verbal experimentation in this anthology, but the selections, which share a keen sense of contemporary life, span a generous range of styles and linger in the mind's eye.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.