Negative Reviews

In the fourth short story of her latest collection, Little Black Book of Stories, A.S. Byatt introduces us to a teacher who believes good writing should not involve working through personal demons. He's promptly knocked off-center when he accidentally discovers trauma in the life of the student he had near-worshipped as the best in his class.
The story illustrates how writing can sometimes overflow with emotion and, at other times, bury those feelings under a mountain of details. Reading through this collection, you'd be hard pressed to dig out the emotions from the avalanche of arcane knowledge with which Byatt smothers her plot lines. She has hit on some interesting plot lines, but Byatt's effusion of language overpowers these stories. It seems that she could carry on about geology forever, leaving her audience to try to squeeze some life out of her sanitized characters.
If Byatt's aim was to show readers how much she knows, how good she is at researching subjects, or how expansive her own vocabulary is, she succeeds. But if she was attempting to interest her readers in her characters and their trials, she should've remembered an elementary maxim of good writing: Show, don't tell.

~ The Providence Journal (Rhode Island)

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Short stories. No sooner in than out. Except sometimes they satisfy. New Yorker short stories can irritate, they are so obscure. Collected, they can yodel. So why does A.S. Byatt's Little Black Book of Stories trill a tune of a different sort?
What the students of Jack Smollett's writing class in the zippy Raw Material would make of A Stone Woman doesn't bear contemplation. "Write what you know" is Smollett's message. "Avoid falseness and strain."

In A Stone Woman, a daughter grieves her mother's death. Something vile happens to her gut. And no wonder. She turns into azure, quartz, opal, hornblende, pyrolusite, uvarovite, glaucophane, shale, gneiss and tuff. Alabaster, peridot, graphite, pearls, agate, jet, jacinth and zircon come later - by now, she's loaded. It's as if Byatt delved into a jewellery thesaurus and had to use the words in something, anything.
Two good stories out of five earns a bronze, not a gold, star. Raw Material was commissioned for Byatt to read at the Ilkley Literature Festival. Her tips on writing and the unexpected gruesome ending made it satisfactorily therapeutic. But is this bagful of shorts Byatt's best? I think not.

~ Sydney Morning Herald Online