Madeleine Minson
Madeleine Minson on Three Sharp New Collections of Short Stoires
Faithless: Tales of Transgression
By Joyce Carol Oates
Fourth Estate 386pp £7.99 order from our bookshop
Who Taught the Beekeeper to Read
By Susan Hill
Chatto & Windus 216pp £10.99 order from our bookshop
A Few Short Notes of Tropical Butterflies
By John Murray
Viking 274pp £14.99 order from our bookshop
AT FIRST GLANCE, the new short-story collections by Joyce Carol Oates, Susan Hill and John Murray don’t seem to have much in common. Two of them are bv old hands (the incredibly prolific Oates, whose books in many genres number well over eighty by now, and the more humanly prolific Hill), while one is by a newcomer (Murray – who is a doctor, born in Australia and now resident in the United States). Geographically, too, they differ. Oates explores the psychopathology of American lives gone askew. while most of the characters in Hill’s stories inhabit a vaguely old-fashioned England, and Murray’s protagonists, scientists and doctors mostly, ready straddle the globe.
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
Chuffed to be on the Curiosity Pill 2020 round-up for my @Lit_Review piece on swimming, which I cannot wait to get back to after 10+ months away https://literaryreview.co.uk/different-strokes https://twitter.com/RNGCrit/status/1351922254687383553
'The authors do not shrink from spelling out the scale of the killings when the Rhodesians made long-distance raids on guerrilla camps in Mozambique and Zambia.'
Xan Smiley on how Rhodesia became Zimbabwe.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/what-the-secret-agent-saw
'Thirkell was a product of her time and her class. For her there are no sacred cows, barring those that win ribbons at the Barchester Agricultural.'
The novelist Angela Thirkell is due a revival, says Patricia T O'Conner (£).
https://literaryreview.co.uk/good-gad