Patricia Craig

In the early chapters the authors examine nineteenth century crime novels. Later they explore the period in this century in which women writers made the detective story their own.

A collection of thirty-three stories showing the scope, vigour, and enduring fascination of the detective story.

xiii,459p. ; 22 cm

Presents an account of his life in South Africa, his battle against apartheid as a newspaper journalist, his banning, and eventual escape from the country.

Travel, associated as it is with strangeness, marvels, and excitement, has always proved an irresistible subject for writers. The Oxford Book of Travel Stories brings together some of the best short fiction on this most exhilarating of subjects from writers as diverse as Anthony Trollope, Edith Wharton, Ring Lardner, William Trevor, Sylvia Townsend Warner, John Cheever, Beryl Bainbridge, and V. S. Pritchett. Readers of this anthology will be able to revel in the atmosphere of nineteenth-century Palestine, the Riviera of the 1920s, or a botanical tour of Greece. There are stories set in far distant locations - China, Australia - and others closer to home, such as Benedict Kiely's entrancing 'A Journey to the Seven Streams'. Most are high-spirited, in keeping with the theme, some are wonderfully funny and one or two productively unsettling, such as Flannery O'Connor's 'A Good Man is Hard to Find'. Some deal with the journey itself, and encounters on train or boat; others see travel as a literal rite of passage, an escape or a sudden growing-up. All of them illustrate, in various ways, how travel has to do with stimulus, enrichment, and a sense of achievement - 'Not fare well,' as T. S. Eliot has it, 'but fare forward, voyagers'.