A.S. Byatt

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The Little Black Book of Stories by A.S. Byatt   This title contains five stories, which are funny, spooky, sparkling and sad. Two women walk into a forest, as they did when they were girls, confronting their childhood fears and memories. An innocent member of an evening class turns out to have her own decided views on how to use "raw material".   More information and prices (covers vary) from: Amazon.com - US dollars SeekBooks.com.au - Australian Dollars Amazon.ca - Canadian dollars Amazon.co.uk - British pounds Amazon.de - Euros Amazon.fr - Euros A Whistling Woman by A.S. Byatt While Frederica -- the spirited heroine of Virgin in the Garden, Still Life, and Babel Tower -- falls almost by accident into a career in television in London, tumultuous events in her home county of Yorkshire threaten to change her life and those of the people she loves. In the late 1960s the world begins to split. Near the university, where the scientists Luk and Jacqueline are studying snails and neurons and the working of the brain, an “anti-university” springs up. On the high moors nearby, a gentle therapeutic community is taken over by a turbulent, charismatic leader. Visions of blood and flames, of mirrors and doubles, share the refracting energy of Frederica’s mosaic-like television shows. The languages of religion, myth and fairy-tale overlap with the terms of science and the new computer age. Darkness and light are in perpetual tension and the meaning of love itself seems to vanish; people flounder, often comically, to find their true sexual, intellectual and emotional identity.   More information and prices (covers vary) from: Amazon.com - US dollars SeekBooks.com.au - Australian Dollars Amazon.ca - Canadian dollars Amazon.co.uk - British pounds Amazon.de - Euros Amazon.fr - Euros

Portraits in Fiction by A.S. Byatt   Portraits seem the opposite of fiction, fixed in time and space, not running with the curve of a story or a life. Yet since the birth of the novel, writers have been fascinated by portraits as icons, as motifs, as images of character and evocations of past time. A.S. Byatt delves into the complex relations between portraits and characters, and between portraits and novels as whole works of art. Her authors range from Henry James to Iris Murdoch, her artists from Holbein to Botticelli, Manet to the present day. She looks at the way writers use portraits to conjure up the past, as in Ford Madox Ford’s The Fifth Queen and Virginia Woolf’s Orlando. She explores their erotic use, the idea of painting as a sexual act, full of danger. And she examines the creation of fictional portrait painters by writers like Balzac and Zola, whose writing was closely linked, in different ways, to the art of Cézanne. A feast for the eye and for the imagination, Portraits in Fiction is a remarkable and immensely enjoyable exploration of the marriage of two great genres. More information and prices (covers vary) from: SeekBooks.com.au - Australian Dollars Amazon.ca - Canadian dollars Amazon.co.uk - British pounds Amazon.de - Euros Amazon.fr - Euros

The Frederica Quartet [BOX SET]

Angels & Insects: Two Novellas