The Isolation Booth is the third volume in Hugh Hood's Collected Stories; it contains short fiction written between 1957 and 1966. While all of the stories have been previously published in various magazines, this is the first time they are available in book form. The title story was first published in The Tamarack Review in 1958; the paid to Hood for that story represents the first income he ever made from his writing.
Since then, Hugh Hood has become `one of Canada's most prolific short-story writers and novelists.' (William French, The Globe & Mail) He has authored more than twenty books, including novels, short-story collections and essays. The Porcupine's Quill has previously published Flying a Red Kite and A Short Walk in the Rain as part of our continuing series of Hood's Collected Stories.
The stories in this collection are varied in form and content, from `The Isolation Booth', which Hood describes in his introduction as `... typical media folklore, the tale of a human sacrifice', to `The Fable of the Ant and the Grasshopper' which is concerned with the moral: `Never oppress the shiftless and the idle; they may have powerful friends.' These stories reflect the variety of Hood's experiments with the form, as well as his continuing concern with the human condition, which prompted William Blackburn to comment, `Hood's thirty-year career demonstrates his profound and compassionate sensitivity to our human predicament.' (Canadian Book Review Annual).
As Hood writes in the introduction to The Isolation Booth, `Surely the society that invents a space called ``the isolation booth'' isn't far removed from the subliminal motivations of the torturers in prisons and camps of one kind or another. I've always shuddered remembering the phrase, yet it was in common use among millions of weekly viewers of big-money TV quiz programmes like ``The $64,000 Question''.' These concerns are (unfortunately) as meaningful now as when `The Isolation Booth' was written in 1958.
