The Booker Prize—winning author of Possession and A Whistling Woman is at her best in this dazzling collection of five new tales.

Little Black Book of Stories offers shivers along with magical thrills. Leaves rustle underfoot in a dark wood: two middle-aged women walk into a forest, as they did when they were girls, confronting their childhood fears and memories and the strange thing they saw–or thought they saw–so long ago. A distinguished male obstetrician and a young woman artist meet in a hospital, but they have very different ideas about body parts, birth, and death. A man meets the ghost of his living wife; a woman turns to stone. And an innocent member of an evening creative writing class turns out to have her own decided views on the best way to use “raw material.”

These unforgettable stories are by turns haunting, funny, sparkling, and scary. Byatt’s Little Black Book adds a deliciously dark note to her skill in mixing folk and fairy tales with everyday life.

"From secret agonies to improper desires and the unthinkable, this slyly titled collection touches on more than a little bit of darkness. Booker Prize-winning author Byatt (Possession) masterfully fuses fantasy with realism in several of these stories, packing a punch with her sometimes witty, sometimes horrifying examinations of faith, art and memory. In the stunning 'The Thing in the Wood,' two young girls, Penny and Primrose, sent to the countryside during the WWII London blitz, confront the unconscious come to life as a monster ('its expression was neither wrath nor greed, but pure misery.... It was made of rank meat, and decaying vegetation'). They return in middle age to face the Thing again, but Penny, a psychotherapist, doesn't fare as well as Primrose, a children's storyteller. A lapsed Catholic gynecologist tries to rescue a starving artist in 'Body Art,' enacting what Byatt casts as the very obstructiveness of the Church he left behind. It's a chilling story that shines with grace. Byatt's modern-day fairy tale, 'A Stone Woman,' details a woman's metamorphosis from flesh to stone, which is both terrible and redemptive ('Jagged flakes of silica and nodes of basalt pushed her breasts upward and flourished under the fall of flesh'). In 'Raw Material,' a creative writing teacher finds inspiration in the work of an elderly student who comes to a gruesome end, the student's life and death imitating bad art very unlike her own. The haunting final story of the collection, 'The Pink Ribbon,' about a man who is more troubled by remembering than by forgetting as he cares for his Alzheimer's-addled wife, turns on the appearance of the ghost of the wife's former self. With an accomplished balance of quotidian detail and eloquent flights of imagination, Byatt has crafted a powerful new collection. Agent, Peter Matson. (May) Forecast: Gorgeously subdued jacket art, the coy title and Byatt's name should attract considerable browser traffic; expect sales to keep pace." Publishers Weekly (Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information, Inc.)

"Byatt demonstrates her formidable skill in this little collection of perfectly rendered pieces. The prose is arresting and memorable, the images linger, getting under your skin." Library Journal

"Carefully constructed, highly allusive, containing fictional artists and artfully faked 'fiction' within the fiction, these five stories are not just meditations on art and its place in the world; they are also thrilling Gothic tales in their own right." Claire Messud, The New York Times Book Review

A new collection of Byatt stories is always a winner and never fails to delight. This one takes an unexpected turn, bringing shivers as well as magical thrills.

Little Black Book of Stories holds its secrets, and they will linger in your mind forever. The five stories in this marvelous collection are by turns funny, spooky, sparkling, sad, and utterly unforgettable.

A. S. Byatt is the author of numerous novels, including A Whistling Woman and Possession which was awarded the Booker Prize in 1990. She has also written two novellas, published together as Angels and Insects four previous collections of shorter works, and several works of nonfiction. Educated at Cambridge, she was a senior lecturer in English at University College London. She lives in London