Positive Reviews

The Gothic has always been a discernible element in A. S . Byatt 's fiction, lending a macabre tone of unease and suspense to books otherwise grounded in encyclopedic amounts of information. It has often rescued her work from the ponderous antiquarianism she is fond of, such as the tedious stretches of contrived Victoriana in "Possession," and has worked best when it has had to struggle against the confines of the short story.

"Little Black Book of Stories" demonstrates this perfectly, with five stories that derive their effect from the way Byatt 's Gothic touch transforms commonplace English settings and characters into unsettling zones of loss and fear.

At the same time, these micro-essays share the nostalgia of her Gothic mode. Stones, rocks, medieval worms, coal stoves, Icelandic folklore, classical mythology all of these move us away from contemporary, post-industrial English society into worlds that operate according to a different set of rules. It is an approach to the past that gives the stories their distinctive quality, and it is also what often makes them limited. For a writer so interested in the relationship between past and present, Byatt often displays a curious indifference to the idea of history. There is no logic beyond the macabre to connect the medieval thing in the forest with wartime England. For all her precise period details, Byatt's wartime England is a shadowy era, limited to a few interesting descriptions of customs and social practices.

~ The Boston Globe
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I had a sort of twist in the gut."
English writer A.S. Byatt is describing an illness she had three years ago _ one that nearly killed her. Doctors told her she'd been about four hours from death.
But "twist in the gut" also could describe the effect her works have on her readers. Her yarns aren't really horror stories. But "fairy tales for grown-ups" _ which is how Vintage Books describes her "Little Black Book of Stories" _ works nicely. Dark fairy tales.Byatt is most famous for "Possession," a hypnotic novel involving literature, scholarship and mystery that won the 1990 Booker Prize. Surely she's a master of the long form. But the "Little Black Book" has its own shadowy charms. In these five stories, readers will meet a woman who turns to stone, a monster both wretched and terrifying, and an aging gent who confronts a youthful doppelganger of his ailing wife.
Having lived through her "twist in the gut," Byatt couldn't resist inflicting it on a character. "A Stone Woman" begins with a series of natural but unpleasant events. An Englishwoman named Ines grieves over the death of her mother. Then her grief turns to illness, as gangrene racks her body's core. Just as Byatt did, she survives _ but as Ines heals from surgery, natural events give way to supernatural: Her blood, flesh and bones begin transforming into layers of precious stones, granite, other rocky materials.
"It is a story about how grief turns you into a stone," Byatt says, yet adds that its ending "curiously turns out to be rather enlivening."

It's a haunting tale, and Byatt makes it look so easy. That's because she takes her time. Too many young writers these days, she thinks, try to force things.
"I think patience, oddly, is what leads to the imagination getting powerful. Don't write it down too fast. I write fiction with a pen; I am that generation. (It has) a kind of biological movement, which I enjoy in the way I never enjoyed dancing, though I do enjoy swimming. I do journalism on computers ... because I adore the word count thing."
A short story may take her "two weeks to write, but I might have been thinking about (it) for two years. I keep very complicated notebooks. I get (my writing) image by image, idea by idea, sentence by sentence. The most important thing you could possibly say to a beginning writer is do not write down a bad sentence that doesn't work, that's going in the wrong direction _ because it'll take you ages to put it right.

~ The Kansas City Star

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Generally accepted premises about how the world works don't apply in A.S. Byatt's haunting new collection, Little Black Book of Stories .
She writes divergent tales that put ordinary people in remarkable situations. In some, Byatt adopts a tone reminiscent of fairy tales and convinces the reader of the plausibility of a grotesque monster in the forest or of a ghostlike figure visiting from the past.
Part mystery with an undertone of horror, Byatt's creations linger in the mind. Some premises, apparently, are worth shaking off for a time.

~ Columbus Dispatch (Ohio)
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In June 2002, a strange story titled "The Thing in the Forest" was published in the New Yorker magazine. I read it because it was written by one of my favorite authors, A.S. Byatt.
I tore it out and filed it because I couldn't stop thinking about it. I needed time to reread it and to puzzle over what it meant and to savor the beautiful and tragic images Byatt conjured up in it.
It was a lovely surprise to find that the odd story I could not stop wondering about was the first in Byatt's new collection "Little Black Book of Stories." Combined with the other stories in the collection, this brief book (both in physical size and length) wallops the reader with its depth and its curiosity about the human condition.

All of the stories in "Little Black Book of Stories" merge fantasy and reality. In "A Stone Woman," the title character does, indeed, turn from flesh to stone. The final story, "The Pink Ribbon," is a heartbreaking tale of a husband who is visited by the ghost of his sick wife.
Individually these stories are a pleasure to read, and collectively, they add up to a superb collection -- one that won't be easily forgotten.

~ Capital Times (Madison, WI)