Madeleine Minson

Madeleine Minson on Three Sharp New Collections of Short Stoires

Faithless: Tales of Transgression

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Fourth Estate 386pp £7.99 order from our bookshop

Who Taught the Beekeeper to Read

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Chatto & Windus 216pp £10.99 order from our bookshop

A Few Short Notes of Tropical Butterflies

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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.

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