If you received a gift card for Christmas or a birthday and you’re looking for something to spend it on, might I suggest you consider the new Penguin Book of the British Short Story edited by Philip Hensher. These two volumes provide a great survey of British short stories. Volume One takes you from Defoe to Buchan. Volume Two takes you from P.G. Wodehouse to Zadie Smith. These books would make a wonderful gift…to yourself! Check out the stories below. See any of your favorites? GRADE: A
TABLE OF CONTENTS:
VOLUME ONE: DANIEL DEFOE TO JOHN BUCHAN:
General Introduction
Daniel Defoe: A True Relation of the Apparition of Mrs Veal
Jonathan Swift: Directions to the Footman
Henry Fielding: The Female Husband
Hannah More: Betty Brown, the St Giles’s Orange Girl: with Some Account of Mrs Sponge, the Money Lender
Mary Lamb: The Farm House
James Hogg: John Gray o’Middleholm
John Galt: The Howdie
Frederick Marryat: South West and by West three-quarters West
William Thackeray: A Little Dinner at Timmins’s
Elizabeth Gaskell: Six Weeks at Heppenheim
Anthony Trollope: An Unprotected Female at the Pyramids
Wilkie Collins: Mrs Badgery
Charles Dickens: Mrs Lirriper’s Lodgings
Thomas Hardy: The Three Strangers
Margaret Oliphant: The Library Window
Robert Louis Stevenson: The Body Snatcher
Arthur Conan Doyle: Silver Blaze
Arthur Morrison: Behind the Shade
“Mrs Ernest Leverson”: Suggestion
Evelyn Sharp: In Dull Brown
T. Baron Russell: A Guardian of the Poor
Joseph Conrad: Amy Foster
H. G. Wells: The Magic Shop
M. R. James: The Stalls of Barchester Cathedral
˜Saki™: The Unrest-Cure
G. K. Chesterton: The Honour of Israel Gow
Max Beerbohm: Enoch Soames
Arnold Bennett: The Matador of the Five Towns
D. H. Lawrence: Daughters of the Vicar
Rudyard Kipling: The Village that Voted the Earth was Flat
Stacy Aumonier: The Great Unimpressionable
Viola Meynell: The Letter
A. E. Coppard: Olive and Camilla
E. M. Delafield: Holiday Group
Dorothy Edwards: A Country House
John Buchan: The King of Ypres
Author Biographies
Acknowledgements
VOLUME TWO: P. G. WODEHOUSE TO ZADIE SMITH
General Introduction
P. G. Wodehouse: Unpleasantness at Bludleigh Court
‘Malachi” Whitaker: Courage
Jack Common: Nineteen
Elizabeth Bowen: The Dancing-Mistress
Evelyn Waugh: Cruise
James Hanley: The German Prisoner
T. H. White: The Point of Thirty Miles
Julian Maclaren-Ross: Death of a Comrade
Alum Lewis: Private Jones
“Henry Green’: The Lull
Sylvia Townsend Warner: The Trumpet Shall Sound
W. Somerset Maugham: Winter Cruise
Roald Dahl: Someone Like You
L. A. G. Strong: The Rook
T. f. Powys: The Key to the Field
Graham Green: The Hint of Explanation
G. F. Green: A Wedding
Angus Wilson: The Wrong Set
Rhys Davies: The Human Condition
Francis King: The Mouse
William Sansom: A Contest of Ladies
Samuel Selvon: Knock on Wood
Muriel Spark: Bang-Bang You’re Dead
Robert Aickman: Bind Your Hair
V. S. Naipaul: The Perfect Tenants
J. G. Ballard: The Cloud-Sculptors of Coral D
Christine Brooke-Rose: Red Rubber Gloves
Elizabeth Taylor: In and Out of the Houses
Kingsley Amis: Mason’s Life
Alan Sillitoe: Mimic
V. S. Pritchett: The Camberwell Beauty
“Jean Rhys”: Pioneers, Oh, Pioneers
Ian McEwan: Pornography
Angela Carter: The Courtship of Mr. Lyon
Doris Lessing: Notes for a Case History
Penelope Fitzgerald: The Means of Escape
Alasdair Gray: Five Letters from an Eastern Empire
Bernard MacLaverty: Phonefun Limited
Shena MacKay: Cardboard City
Beryl Bainbridge: The Longstop
Douglas Dunn: Bobby’s Room
Georgina Hammick: Grist
Adam Marz-Jones: Baby Church
George MacKay Brown: Three Old Men
A. S. Byatt: Racine and the Tablecloth
Martin Amis: Career Move
Candia McWilliam: The Only Only
Janice Galloway: last thing
Ali Smith: miracle survivors
Tessa Hadley: Buckets of Blood
Adam Marek: The 40-Litre Monkey
Jon McGregor: The Remains
Zadie Smith: The Embassy of Cambodia
Author Biographies
Acknowledgements