About the Author
Malcolm Bradbury is a novelist, critic, television dramatist and Emeritus Professor of American Studies at the University of East Anglia. He is author of the novels Eating People is Wrong (1959); Stepping Westward (1965); The History Man (1975); which won the Royal Society of Literature Heinemann Prize and was adapted as a famous television series; Rates of Exchange (1983) which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize; Cuts: A Very Short Novel (1987), also televised; and Doctor Criminale (1992). His critical works include The Modern American Novel (1984; revised edition, 1992); No, Not Bloomsbury (essays, 1987); The Modern world: Ten Great Writers (1988); From Puritanism to Post-modernism: A History of American Literature (with Richard Ruland, 1991) He is the author of a collection of seven stories and nine parodies, entitled Who Do You Think You Are? (1976), and of several works of humour and satire, including Why Come to Slaka? (1986), Unsent Letters (1988; revised edition, 1995) and Mensonge (1987). Many of his books are published by Penguin. In addition, he has written many television plays and the television 'novel' The Gravy Train and The Gravy Train Goes East. He has adapted several television series, including Tom Sharpe's Porterhouse Blue, Kinglsey Amis's The Green Man and Stella Gibbon's' Cold Comfort Farm, now a feature film.
Malcolm Bradbury lives in Norwich, travels good deal, and in 1991 he was awarded the CBE.
Table of Contents
Modern British Short Stories Acknowledgements
Introduction
Malcolm Lowry: Strange Comfort Afforded by the Profession
(from Hear Us O Lord From Heaven Thy Dwelling Place)
Samuel Beckett: Ping
(from Collected Shorter Prose 1945-80)
Elizabeth Bowen: Mysterious Kor
(from The Collected Stories of Elizabeth Bowen)
V. S. Pritchett: A Family Man
(from V. S. Pritchett: Collected Stories)
Dylan Thomas: The Burning Baby
(from Adventures in the Skin Trade)
Graham Greene: The Invisible Japanese Gentlemen
(from May We Borrow Your Husband)
Angus Wilson: More Friend Than Lodger
(from A Bit Off the Map)
Jean Rhys: The Lotus
(from Tigers Are Better Looking)
William Golding: Miss Pulkinhorn
(from Encounter, August 1960)
Kingsley Amis: My Enemy's Enemy
(from Kingsley Amis: Collected Short Stories)
Ted Hughes: The Rain Horse
(from Wodwo)
Alan Sillitoe: The Fishing-boat Picture
(from The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner)
Doris Lessing: To Room Nineteen
(from A Man and Two Women)
Muriel Spark: The House of the Famous Poet
(from Bang Bang You're Dead)
John Fowles: The Enigma
(from The Ebony Tower)
J. G. Ballard: Memories of the Space Age
(from Firebird 3)
William Trevor: A Meeting in Middle Age
(from The Stories of William Trevor)
Edna O'Brien: In the Hours of Darkness
(from Mrs. Reinhardt and Other Stories)
B. S. Johnson: A Few Selected Sentences
(from Aren't You Rather Young to be Writing Your Memoirs?)
Malcolm Bradbury: Composition
(from Who Do You Think You Are?)
Fay Weldon: Weekend
(from Watching Me Watching You)
David Lodge: Hotel Des Boobs
(from Cosmopolitan, 1986)
Beryl Bainbridge: Clap Hands, Here Comes Charlie
(from Mum and Mrs. Armitage)
Ian McEwan: Psychopolis
(from In Between the Sheets)
Angela Carter: Flesh and the Mirror
(from Fireworks)
Martin Amis: Let Me Count the Times
(from Granta 4)
Rose Tremain: My Wife is a White Russian
(from Granta 7)
Salman Rushdie: The Prophet's Hair
(from London Review of Books, 16 August 1981)
Julian Barnes: One of a Kind
(from New Stories 7)
Emma Tennant: Philomela
(from Bananas Anthology)
Clive Sinclair: Bedbugs
(from Bedbugs)
Graham Swift: Seraglio
(from Learning to Swim)
Kazuo Ishiguro: A Family Supper
(from Firebird 2)
Adam Mars-Jones: Structural Anthropology
(from Firebird 1)