Everyman fiction

William Trevor is one of the renowned figures in contemporary literature, described as 'the greatest living writer of short stories in the English language' by the New Yorker and acclaimed for his haunting and profound insights into the human heart. Here is the ultimate collection of his short fiction, with dozens of tales spanning his career and ranging from the moving to the macabre, the humorous to the haunting. From the penetrating 'Memories of Youghal' to the bittersweet 'Bodily Secrets' and the elegiac 'Two More Gallants', here are masterpieces of insight, depth, drama and humanity, acutely rendered by a modern master.

[Comment by Christopher Priest, on The Guardian's website]: The Voices of Time by JG Ballard (1960) > When he died two years ago, JG Ballard was widely celebrated for his novels, and rightly. [Empire of the Sun], an account of his wartime internment in Shanghai, brought him a Spielberg movie and a worldwide audience, but he also wrote the remarkable novels [Crash], [High-Rise], Cocaine Nights and many more. Inspired by Dalí, De Chirico, William Burroughs and Jean Genet, his talent was unique: his vivid, surprising and often beautiful prose was put to the creation of dreamlike and sometimes shocking images, while telling a deceptively straightforward narrative. > Ballard began writing in 1955 (he was in his mid-20s) and his first serious novel, [The Drowned World], did not appear until seven years later. Before that he produced a stream of astonishing short stories, which to long-term admirers of Ballard's writing are among his finest fiction. In them he explored for the first time many of the themes which in new guises were to coil their way through his better known later work. Supreme in these stories is an extraordinary novella, The Voices of Time, first published in 1960 and later the title story of a collection. > The plot almost defies summary. An imminent global disaster is seen from the viewpoint of a group of sleep-addicted scientists, slowly going mad in a desert installation surrounded by salt lakes, where genetic experiments have bred mutant animals to resist the radiated atmosphere. Meanwhile, a countdown to the end of the universe has begun, a suicidal madman engraves a mandala on the floor of an emptied swimming pool, a sleep-deprived astronomer cruises the dunes in a white Packard saloon, a raven-haired temptress named Coma plays the men off against each other. Somehow it all seems to make crazy and brilliant sense. I have read the story a dozen times, never actually understood it, but also have never failed to draw inspiration and encouragement from Ballard's pellucid writing and the amazing and surreal images. : : :

Three players of a summer game. The important thing. One arm. Portrait of a girl in glass. The coming of something to the Widow Holly. Two on a party. The yellow bird. The field of blue children. The malediction. The angel in the alcove. The resemblance between a violin case and a coffin. The night of the iguana.

Miss Oates turns her piercing eye upon the men and women who people a prestigious upstate college, probing the marriage, affairs, and comic intrigues that lie beneath the school's serene exterior.

"The reader follows folklorist Stan Binstead and his unwanted wife Millie into the bush and watches her transformation, by virtue of a new haircut and a couple of smashing outfits, from dependence to self-awareness. Millie becomes the admired center of the expedition; more significantly, she meets and falls in love with Henry Lewis, the fabled hunter about whose person has grown up precisely the lore that Stan has set out to research. Nicknamed Simba (Bantu for lion), Lewis is envied, even hated, by the other hunters, but made one of their own by the beasts of the bush, a rite of passage he transfers to the woman he has chosen. As the hunting party, frozen, looks on, a lion materializes from the thicket of trees, glides up to Millie, as if to memorize her, then suddenly turns and streaks away. The scene glows, like a painting in primary color. Deep in the forest a dark and subtle magic is taking place, and thereby hangs this impressive tale, taut with the thrill of the hunt and the spell of the unknown"--Publisher's Weekly online review.