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.
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From the archive, Paul Foot on Tony Benn's diaries.
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