The Little Black Book of Stories [Hardcover]

From secret agonies to improper desires and the unthinkable, this slyly titled collection touches on more than a little bit of darkness. Booker Prize–winning author Byatt (Possession) masterfully fuses fantasy with realism in several of these stories, packing a punch with her sometimes witty, sometimes horrifying examinations of faith, art and memory. In the stunning "The Thing in the Wood," two young girls, Penny and Primrose, sent to the countryside during the WWII London blitz, confront the unconscious come to life as a monster ("its expression was neither wrath nor greed, but pure misery.... It was made of rank meat, and decaying vegetation"). They return in middle age to face the Thing again, but Penny, a psychotherapist, doesn't fare as well as Primrose, a children's storyteller. A lapsed Catholic gynecologist tries to rescue a starving artist in "Body Art," enacting what Byatt casts as the very obstructiveness of the Church he left behind. It's a chilling story that shines with grace. Byatt's modern-day fairy tale, "A Stone Woman," details a woman's metamorphosis from flesh to stone, which is both terrible and redemptive ("Jagged flakes of silica and nodes of basalt pushed her breasts upward and flourished under the fall of flesh"). In "Raw Material," a creative writing teacher finds inspiration in the work of an elderly student who comes to a gruesome end, the student's life and death imitating bad art very unlike her own. The haunting final story of the collection, "The Pink Ribbon," about a man who is more troubled by remembering than by forgetting as he cares for his Alzheimer's-addled wife, turns on the appearance of the ghost of the wife's former self. With an accomplished balance of quotidian detail and eloquent flights of imagination, Byatt has crafted a powerful new collection.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an alternate Hardcover edition.

Byatt is commanding. Her prose is crisp and astringent. Her insights are lacerating, her approach sly, her visions searing, her wit honed, and her imagination peripatetic and larcenous, feasting on art, myth, fairy tales, and science. While her novels, including the brilliant A Whistling Woman (2002) and the Booker Prize-winning Possession (1990), are complex and powerful, her short stories are dazzling concentrates. As in her earlier collections, The Matisse Stories (1995), The Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye (1997), and Elementals (1999), Byatt creates, in her newest set of gems, a palimpsest of art and life as she examines how each shapes the other, and how trauma, be it personal or the mass psychosis of war, irrevocably transforms personalities and lives. In several galvanizing and highly original tales, including "Body Art," in which a gynecologist reluctantly gets involved with an angry young artist, she postulates deeply intriguing conflicts over the sacredness and profanity of the body and the vulnerability of the mind. And once again, Byatt proves herself to be the queen of fractured fairy tales. In "The Thing in the Woods," two young girls evacuated from London at the start of World War II see something loathsome in the forest, a grotesque embodiment of evil, while "A Stone Woman" stands as a gloriously beautiful evocation of grief and metamorphosis. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to an alternate Hardcover edition.

Woods-their shadows, beauty, unfathomability and power to absorb and transform the unsuspecting traveler-also figure in Byatt’s fifth collection, Little Black Book of Stories, although in a much more pointedly allegorical fashion. Byatt is a writer who understands that the surreal, raw underpinnings of the fairy tale do not exist outside the realms of “true life”; they are, in fact, the very stuff of it. As Penny, in the collection’s opener, “The Thing in the Forest”, remarks, “I think there are things that are real-more real than we are-but mostly we don’t cross their paths, or they don’t cross ours. Maybe at very bad times we get into their world, or notice what they are doing in ours.” More Agent Mulder than Booker Prize Winner? Possibly. This quintet of stories is replete with the paranormal: doppelgangers, ghosts, monsters and odd transmogrifications-they all rear their ugly, unsettling heads. But what makes Byatt’s take on these “supernatural” phenomena compelling is the way she yokes them so completely to our very nature as human beings. In other words, they exist because we exist; the suspension of disbelief is a moot point. When Primrose, Penny’s friend and fellow witness to the monster of the title, recalls a World War II childhood-“She told herself stories at night about a girl-woman, an enchantress in a fairy wood, loved and protected by stuffed creatures, as the house in the blitz was banked in by inadequate sandbags.”-we understand that she has only, and necessarily, cast the spells she requires in order to survive.
Byatt closes the collection with another story rooted in London, in the Second World War, “The Pink Ribbon”. In this heartrending tale, James-who is caring, with equal measures of compassion and despair, for his elderly, demented wife, “Maddy Mad Mado”-answers the door to a young, vibrant woman, a woman he later realizes to be Mado’s “fetch”, a symbol of all she once was, and someone James “barely remembered and could not mourn.” Like the opening story, the characters in “The Pink Ribbon” have been lacerated by the wreckage of the past, by war-time leave-takings and loneliness. These are losses, Byatt seems to be saying, that can only be expressed in fairy tale extremes and archetypes.
“The Stone Woman”, perhaps the most disturbing of the stories offered, details a woman’s gradual transformation from flesh to stone in language made lyrical by its geological specificity. Although I found the prose here exquisite, the endless cataloguing of stony change sometimes made for a claustrophobic narrative space, and I hankered for a happy ending that never quite, um, crystallized. Fortunately, “Body Art”, wherein a fierce, pierced installation artist falls into the arms of an unsuspecting doctor (a doctor whose respect for the sanctity of life and residue of religion eventually run smack up against the artist’s damaged body and complicated will) provides more joyful closure. In this story, an almost impossible stew of characters melt and finally merge into an undeniably hopeful flavour. It is a fairy tale finale tempered only by its grounding in “the melodramatic way of real lives.”
Similarly, in the spoofy (and ultimately spooky) “Raw Materials”, a creative writing teacher-the well-intentioned and ill-equipped Jack Smollett-instructs his students not to “invent melodrama for the sake of it,” and is later paralyzed in the face of an event that seems torn from the pages of the most torrid tabloid. Here then is one of the many revelations (each more thrilling and gratifying than any X-file) that spring from the pages of Byatt’s Little Black Book: life is not, in itself, art; yet art also cannot hide from the alternately uplifting and devastating soap opera that is “real” life.
Heather Birrell (Books in Canada)
-- Books in Canada

A new collection of Byatt stories is always a winner and never fails to delight. This one takes an unexpected turn, bringing shivers as well as magical thrills.

The Little Black Book holds its secrets, and they will linger in your mind forever. Leaves rustle underfoot in a dark wood: two middle-aged women walk into a forest, as they did when they were girls, confronting their childhood fears and memories and the strange thing they saw -- or thought they saw -- so long ago. A distinguished male obstetrician and a young woman artist meet in a hospital. But both of them have very different ideas about body parts, birth and death. An innocent member of an evening class turns out to have her own decided views on how to use “raw material.” The five stories in this marvelous collection are by turns funny, spooky, sparkling, sad, and utterly unforgettable.

“A delight. . . . Byatt's stories are provoking and alarming, richly yet tautly rendered. . . .[She] has the sheer narrative skill to raise the hairs on the back of your neck and make your pulse race.” –The New York Times Book Review

“Bewitching . . . immensely readable, fiercely intelligent, and studded with astonishing, refracting images. . . . A virtuoso performance by a master storyteller.” –Los Angeles Times Book Review

“Supremely elegant. . . . Byatt peels back the surface of everyday life–and what she reveals may disturb your sleep.” –Entertainment Weekly

“Striking . . . marvelous . . . impressive. . . . Byatt’s Gothic touch transforms commonplace English settings and characters into unsettling zones of loss and fear.” –The Boston Globe

“A storyteller who could keep a sultan on the edge of his throne for a thousand and one nights.” –The New York Times Book Review

“Scrumptious . . . these are raw, tough, disruptive stories about memory, duty, madness, guilt, cruelty and loss, stories that grope and reel, that throb with secret longings, secret histories, artistic yearnings and the thrashes and groans of a stinking damnation in the underbrush.”–Miami Herald

“Her finest collection yet. . . . Bleak then surprisingly funny, very dark indeed then full of inconceivable sources of light.” –The Guardian

“Beautifully crafted. . . [Little Black Book of Stories] prods at the tender points where art, pain, and desire intersect.” –The Financial Times

“A potent alchemy of magic, horror and sensual delight.” –Elle

“Captivating . . . disturbing yet funny . . . an utterly compelling read.” –Harper’s Bazaar

“A delightful surprise. . . . A heady infusion of mythology and everyday life, with a strong undercurrent of horror. . . . Moving, thought-provoking, witty, and shocking all at once.” –The Sunday Telegraph

“Haunting . . . Astonishing . . . Vivid . . . Moving . . . [Byatt] is an athlete of the imagination, breaking barriers without apparent effort.” –The Nation

“A sophisticated and powerfully realized work. . . . A bravura performance of imaginative artistry.” –The Times Literary Supplement --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

A.S. Byatt is internationally acclaimed as a novelist, short story writer and critic. Educated at Cambridge, she taught at the Central School of Art and Design and at University College, London before becoming a full-time writer in 1983. Her most recent novel is A Whistling Woman, the conclusion of the famous “Frederica” quartet.

The Thing in the Forest

There were once two little girls who saw, or believed they saw, a thing in a forest. The two little girls were evacuees, who had been sent away from the city by train, with a large number of other children. They all had their names attached to their coats with safetypins, and they carried little bags or satchels, and the regulation gas-mask. They wore knitted scarves and bonnets or caps, and many had knitted gloves attached to long tapes which ran along their sleeves, inside their coats, and over their shoulders and out, so that they could leave their ten woollen fingers dangling, like a spare pair of hands, like a scarecrow. They all had bare legs and scuffed shoes and wrinkled socks. Most had wounds on their knees in varying stages of freshness and scabbiness. They were at the age when children fall often and their knees were unprotected. With their suitcases, some of which were almost too big to carry, and their other impedimenta, a doll, a toy car, a comic, they were like a disorderly dwarf regiment, stomping along the platform.

The two little girls had not met before, and made friends on the train. They shared a square of chocolate, and took alternate bites at an apple. One gave the other the inside page of her Beano. Their names were Penny and Primrose. Penny was thin and dark and taller, possibly older, than Primrose, who was plump and blonde and curly. Primrose had bitten nails, and a velvet collar to her dressy green coat. Penny had a bloodless transparent paleness, a touch of blue in her fine lips. Neither of them knew where they were going, nor how long the journey might take. They did not even know why they were going, since neither of their mothers had quite known how to explain the danger to them. How do you say to your child, I am sending you away, because enemy bombs may fall out of the sky, because the streets of the city may burn like forest fires of brick and timber, but I myself am staying here, in what I believe may be daily danger of burning, burying alive, gas, and ultimately perhaps a grey army rolling in on tanks over the suburbs, or sailing its submarines up our river, all guns blazing? So the mothers (who did not resemble each other at all) behaved alike, and explained nothing, it was easier. Their daughters they knew were little girls, who would not be able to understand or imagine.

The girls discussed on the train whether it was a sort of holiday or a sort of punishment, or a bit of both. Penny had read a book about Boy Scouts, but the children on the train did not appear to be Brownies or Wolf Cubs, only a mongrel battalion of the lost. Both little girls had the idea that these were all perhaps not very good children, possibly being sent away for that reason. They were pleased to be able to define each other as 'nice'. They would stick together, they agreed. Try to sit together, and things.

The train crawled sluggishly further and further away from the city and their homes. It was not a clean train - the upholstery of their carriage had the dank smell of unwashed trousers, and the gusts of hot steam rolling backwards past their windows were full of specks of flimsy ash, and sharp grit, and occasional fiery sparks that pricked face and fingers like hot needles if you opened the window. It was very noisy too, whenever it picked up a little speed. The engine gave great bellowing sighs, and the invisible wheels underneath clicked rhythmically and monotonously, tap-tap-tap-CRASH, tap-tap-tap-CRASH. The window-panes were both grimy and misted up. The train stopped frequently, and when it stopped, they used their gloves to wipe rounds, through which they peered out at flooded fields, furrowed hillsides and tiny stations whose names were carefully blacked out, whose platforms were empty of life.

The children did not know that the namelessness was meant to baffle or delude an invading army. They felt - they did not think it out, but somewhere inside them the idea sprouted - that the erasure was because of them, because they were not meant to know where they were going or, like Hansel and Gretel, to find the way back. They did not speak to each other of this anxiety, but began the kind of conversation children have about things they really disliked, things that upset, or disgusted, or frightened them. Semolina pudding with its grainy texture, mushy peas, fat on roast meat. Listening to the stairs and the window-sashes creaking in the dark or the wind. Having your head held roughly back over the basin to have your hair washed, with cold water running down inside your liberty bodice. Gangs in playgrounds. They felt the pressure of all the other alien children in all the other carriages as a potential gang. They shared another square of chocolate, and licked their fingers, and looked out at a great white goose flapping its wings beside an inky pond.

The sky grew dark grey and in the end the train halted. The children got out, and lined up in a crocodile, and were led to a mud-coloured bus. Penny and Primrose managed to get a seat together, although it was over the wheel, and both of them began to feel sick as the bus bumped along snaking country lanes, under whipping branches, dark leaves on dark wooden arms on a dark sky, with torn strips of thin cloud streaming across a full moon, visible occasionally between them.