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Little Black Book of Stories (Paperback)

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3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (15 customer reviews)
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  Hardcover, April 19, 2004 -- $7.75 $0.15
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Little Black Book of Stories + Sugar and Other Stories + The Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye
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Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

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 the Hardcover edition.


From Bookmarks Magazine

Byatt’s readers fall into two camps. Some find her enthusiasm for minutiae in these Gothic tales infuriating—not everyone wants to read an extended description of the proper treatment of stoves. These detractors find this collection too smart for its own good, its many facts and metafictional digressions obstructing real emotion. Most readers, however, fell under Byatt’s spell. For all her book-learning, many agree that Byatt can spin a story that’s captivatingly scary—and perhaps more. Several praised these stories—“A Stone Woman” and “Body Art” in particular—as funny, poignant, and even uplifting. Byatt, award-winning author of Possession, may be only too willing to show off her knowledge of a variety of subjects. But for many, this knowledge only adds to her power.

Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

  • Paperback: 256 pages
  • Publisher: Vintage (February 8, 2005)
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-10: 1400075602
  • ISBN-13: 978-1400075607
  • Product Dimensions: 8 x 5.1 x 0.7 inches
  • Shipping Weight: 7.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
  • Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (15 customer reviews)
  • Amazon.com Sales Rank: #105,584 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

15 Reviews
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Average Customer Review
3.9 out of 5 stars (15 customer reviews)
 
 
 
 
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12 of 14 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars From dark to bizarre, to brilliant!, August 13, 2004
By contessa malia (Mililani, Hawaii) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Little Black Book of Stories (Hardcover)
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?
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7 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars To write like this!, June 26, 2004
By Joanna Catherine Scott (Chapel Hill, NC USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   
This review is from: Little Black Book of Stories (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.
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars "Little" but strong, June 2, 2004
This review is from: Little Black Book of Stories (Hardcover)
British author A.S. Byatt reached her artistic pinnacle in the erudite, exquisite "Possession." But she's still in excellent form in "Little Black Book of Stories," a simple short story collection that embraces the tender, the macabre, and the fantastical, all wrapped in her lush prose.

"The Thing in the Forest" opens with a pair of young girls wandering in the woods -- only to come across a ghastly, inhuman monster. That monster haunts their memories as they grow up separately. "Body Art" tells of a obstetrician and his strange quasi-romantic relationship with a messed-up art student, which raises questions about birth, death and love.

"A Stone Woman" is born after surgery, when Ines finds that her body is slowly changing into a form of living stone. "Raw Material" takes a nasty twist, when a creative writing class, and a strange story, ends in murder. And "The Pink Ribbon" introduces James, an old man caring for his senile wife Mado... until a strange young woman with a connection to Mado comes into his life.

The thing that links the parts of "Book" together is the fantastical and horrific. "Body Art" is the one that doesn't fit in, since it's all solidly set in the real world; but the rest is a mass of Icelandic troll-women, ghosts of people who are still alive, and the Loathly Worm. Even "Raw" is a horror story, based on the evil that people can do.

Byatt's stories are beautifully self-contained, even if they don't always end on a completely conclusive note (the exception being "Thing," which feels unfinished). And her writing is still outstanding, flexible and versatile; she can write like a child or an intellectual, a writer or a scientist. She goes slightly overboard describing the various kinds of stone that the "Stone Woman" turns into, but that's a minor detail.

Richly-written and wonderfully evocative, "Little Black Book of Stories" is a rewarding if slightly flawed collection of Byatt's latest. An excellent way to pass a sunny afternoon.

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Most Recent Customer Reviews

5.0 out of 5 stars Stories about stories
Although billed as "fairy tales for grown-ups" like the author's earlier collection, THE DJINN IN THE NIGHTINGALE'S EYE, fantasy plays a major part in only one of the five longish... Read more
Published 13 months ago by Roger Brunyate

1.0 out of 5 stars NEVER RECEIVED ITEM
i HAVE NOTHING TO SAY ABOUT THIS ITEM, BECAUSE IT WAS NEVER RECEIVED. i DON'T KNOW WHETHER THE SELLER SENT IT, AS SHE SAID SHE DID, OR BUNGLED THE ADDRESS, OR JUST POCKETED THE... Read more
Published 16 months ago by Marilyn B. Brooks

5.0 out of 5 stars Beautifully written
I first discovered A.S. Byatt's work a few years ago when I picked up this book, quite honestly because the cover was pretty. Read more
Published on November 2, 2007 by A. Malouin

3.0 out of 5 stars Not completely uninteresting, but...
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. Read more
Published on October 25, 2006 by Sarah J. Haynes

4.0 out of 5 stars Other Authors Must Be Intimidated
Little Black Book of Stories by A.S. Byatt, 5 stories that will seize your mind and show up in your dreams. Read more
Published on September 29, 2006 by Sandra Jones

1.0 out of 5 stars Let's watch grass grow...
Nothing about these stories is horror, or even scary. I wasn't expecting gore or extreme horror, or even Victorian ghost stories. Read more
Published on June 22, 2005 by F.Faulkner

2.0 out of 5 stars A Disapointing Read...
As the sole dissenting view so far, I'll say that perhaps one has to have read Byatt's critically acclaimed "Possession" in order to appreciate what she's done here but I must... Read more
Published on June 20, 2005 by J. Peyton

4.0 out of 5 stars A great collection of stories!
This was a great little book of stories. I wanted something I could read that was short and entertaining. The only story I did not "get" was the "Stone Woman. Read more
Published on May 4, 2005 by Kate M. Smalley

5.0 out of 5 stars Incredibly Mysterious "Twilight-Zone"-Like Stories
This book has inventive, creative, modern, surprising stories with great depth. They often have a mysterious eeriness that hooks the reader from the start and keeps them glued... Read more
Published on December 1, 2004 by Erika Borsos

5.0 out of 5 stars True Talent
Initially I was attracted to "Little Black Book" by its mysterious cover that appeared aged amongst a sea of glossy new titles. As her book appears, A. S. Read more
Published on July 14, 2004 by Stephanie Rose Bird

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