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Product Description
Review
Five new stories from the author of Possession, A Whistling Woman, Angels and Insects and many other celebrated novels. The word 'black' in the title draws attention not just to an attractive feature of the cover design (austere black books stand out well in a display with all their gaudy display of competing designs), but also to a darkening of thematic tone, a lowering of the lights, as Byatt places her characters in a dark wood, has them argue about death and body parts, and introduces a particularly unforgettable evening class. A new collection from one of our most distinguished writers and critics. A major event, of course, and the literary world will sit up and take notice.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Book Description
'Little Black Book of Stories is a showcase of Byatt's talents-the ideal primer for anyone who has not yet discovered A S Byatt, and a delight for those who have' Daily Telegraph
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
23 of 25 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
In these five short stories Byatt once again displays her talent for making the magical out of the mundane. Byatt takes a simple cloth and embroiders it until she has a tale woven richly with mythology and allegory, and strung with references classical and modern, literary and popular. Her well-structured stories are deceptively simple. You close the book feeling satisfied but something draws you back. When you look again, the focus of the stories seem to have shifted slightly and the different facets become apparent.
In The Thing in the Forest we discover that when something terrible happens to us at a young age it can become both more real and less real than anything else in our lives. The memory of the thing begins to mould the person we become and continues to shape our actions as an adult until, for better or worse, it leads us back to the source of our terror. " 'Sometimes I think that thing finished me off,' said Penny to Primrose".
Body Art takes us to that crossroads where modern art meets the base realities of the human body and science has to contend with human emotion.
A Stone Woman is about grief and transformation: a beautifully crafted fairytale, vibrant with colour and texture, with a setting that moves from the landscape of the flesh to the landscape of Norse mythology.
"There was fresh blood on the forget-me-nots and primroses in the carpet. It was not nice." Raw Material is about words. Why do we consider some subjects more worthy of our creative attention than others? Should creative writing be therapeutic? And what precisely is 'Real writing'? Set (as is much of Byatt's work) in a literary environment, where a lacklustre lecturer discusses these issues with the unmemorable members of his creative writing class, this story winds its way to a surprising end.
The Pink Ribbon takes us into the world of poor mad Mado and her suffering husband and carer James. When one day a beautiful young woman knocks on their door begging for sanctuary, James begins to feel that she knows a little too much about them both...
2 of 3 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
Of the stories in this book, the best, in my opinion, is the Stone Woman. It is an odd, captivating story. Byatt's meticulous, evocative descriptions of the properties of different stones turns the disquieting image of the woman's transformation into something beautiful and strangely natural. This tale feels almost like folklore or a fairy tale by the end.
The other stories in this collection not as enchanting, although I would have happily bought this for the Stone Woman alone.
Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
Amazon.com:
18 reviews
12 of 14 people found the following review helpful
From dark to bizarre, to brilliant!
13 Aug 2004
Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase
There is an axiom that states "Don't judge a book by its cover." In this case, the black fading into charcoal gray dust jacket (with a flowering golden sprig) is a precursor of things to come. The stories are dark, somber and brilliant. Who else could construct a series of stories where grief, anger and abuse are manifested in such creative, innovative and bizarre ways?
A woman loses her mother. The relationship, while lightly touched upon, was probably an inseparable one (the daughter states, "She was the flesh of my flesh. I was the flesh of her flesh.") Post the mother's death, her daughter begins to turn to stone but not just any stone; she begins layer by layer to manifest the various exotic stones found in Iceland. They are veined, with complex glints of underlying colors and multiple hues.
Then there is an Icelandic sculptor who goes to enormous difficulty to bring her rigid, statue-like self back to the land of his ancestors. Was this all a metaphor for a woman who was experiencing grief? An unmarried woman, the reader might conjecture, who was faced with an enormous personal transformation without her mother? One who needed a sculptor to introduce her to the real and essential self whom she had not previously recognized?
The bizarre journey proceeds as the reader meets the members of a writing class, experiences the rich memories of its oldest class member, as she describes everyday life when running a household was much more labor intensive. There was the cast iron stove to be kept highly polished on a daily basis, the laundry that was to be boiled, stirred and immersed into multiple rinses. Then came the laborious ironing! The woman's writings depicted a gentle, hardworking woman, and an anachronism to other class members who tore her writings apart because of their being perceived as commonplace. Who is she really? The writing class teacher later discovers part of her mystery...much to his horror!
A pink ribbon is the only adornment of a woman whose very self is being lost to dementia. Through a "tarted up" ghost, the reader discovers her in retrospect. To say more is to spoil!
Byatt is a genius! The stories might seem just that ... short stories. It's the pondering and opportunities for analysis that the stories invite. There exist many possibilities for each of the characters, their lives, their challenges, their joys and obstacles. Byatt layers her challenges to the reader. On the surface, what were the stories about? But beneath the layers, what were the stories really about?
A woman loses her mother. The relationship, while lightly touched upon, was probably an inseparable one (the daughter states, "She was the flesh of my flesh. I was the flesh of her flesh.") Post the mother's death, her daughter begins to turn to stone but not just any stone; she begins layer by layer to manifest the various exotic stones found in Iceland. They are veined, with complex glints of underlying colors and multiple hues.
Then there is an Icelandic sculptor who goes to enormous difficulty to bring her rigid, statue-like self back to the land of his ancestors. Was this all a metaphor for a woman who was experiencing grief? An unmarried woman, the reader might conjecture, who was faced with an enormous personal transformation without her mother? One who needed a sculptor to introduce her to the real and essential self whom she had not previously recognized?
The bizarre journey proceeds as the reader meets the members of a writing class, experiences the rich memories of its oldest class member, as she describes everyday life when running a household was much more labor intensive. There was the cast iron stove to be kept highly polished on a daily basis, the laundry that was to be boiled, stirred and immersed into multiple rinses. Then came the laborious ironing! The woman's writings depicted a gentle, hardworking woman, and an anachronism to other class members who tore her writings apart because of their being perceived as commonplace. Who is she really? The writing class teacher later discovers part of her mystery...much to his horror!
A pink ribbon is the only adornment of a woman whose very self is being lost to dementia. Through a "tarted up" ghost, the reader discovers her in retrospect. To say more is to spoil!
Byatt is a genius! The stories might seem just that ... short stories. It's the pondering and opportunities for analysis that the stories invite. There exist many possibilities for each of the characters, their lives, their challenges, their joys and obstacles. Byatt layers her challenges to the reader. On the surface, what were the stories about? But beneath the layers, what were the stories really about?
9 of 11 people found the following review helpful
To write like this!
26 Jun 2004
Format:Hardcover
To write like this, to really write like this, what power! These stories take hold of the mind like the great myths of the past. The sentences are crisp and clean, and simple in the way the best of all great writing is simple, with a simplicity that stirs to life the deep complexities of the subconscious. If I could write like this I would die happy.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful
Not completely uninteresting, but...
25 Oct 2006
Format:Paperback
This is my first foray into Ms. Byatt's work and I wanted something in short doses that I could read on the train on my way to work. However, I was also a bit disappointed. Her prose style is spare and austere and interesting for that reason. I must admit, I liked her writing style, which is probably the only thing about her stories that accounts for the adjective "eerie" in so many of the descriptions of these stories. But I must agree that further description of these stories as horror or "dark" is not so. They are contemplative and moody and occasionally thought-provoking, but not so much that I felt grabbed or hooked or even very much-compelled to keep turning the pages. And please do not dismiss my remarks as coming from someone who does not appreciate fine literature when she sees it. While I can't speak for others who did not like the book, for myself, I count The Brothers Karamazov, Crime and Punishment, Les Miserables, Jane Eyre, Austen's works, Dicken's works, and others among my favorites, in addition to works by more modern and less 'classic' writers such as Douglas Coupland, Chuck Pahluniuk and Tom Robbins. If I were to put my finger on it, the stories attempt to conjure a depth of plot and of character that simply isn't there when all is said and done, and instead leaves you with a sense that it's all just a touch overly maudlin/melodramatically sappy to be taken seriously as a worthwhile read. Not for the reader interested in genuinely intellectually and/or emotionally stimulating reading.
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