Synopses & Reviews
The Library of Wales Story anthologies feature the very best of Welsh short fiction, written amid the political, social, and economic turbulence of 20th-century Wales and beyond. More than 80 outstanding works from the classics of Dylan Thomas, Rhys Davies, Arthur Machen, and Gwyn Thomas to the almost forgotten brilliance of work by Margiad Evans and Dilys Rowe and then forward to the prize-winning work of Emyr Humphreys, Rachel Trezise, and Leonora Brito, coloring and engaging in the life of a changed country. Story Volume 2 depicts a Wales facing up to a dramatically changed culture and society in a world where the old certainties of class and money, of love and war, of living and surviving do not hold. The writers explore the spirit of a country while the ground keeps shifting beneath them. In this selection Dai Smith has crafted an anthology that gives a unique insight into the life of a country: identity, language, class, and sex are all explored intensely in this kaleidoscope of the best of the last 50 years of Welsh short fiction.
About the Author
Dai Smith is a part-time research chair of the cultural history of Wales at Swansea University and has been a lecturer at the Universities of Lancaster, Swansea, and Cardiff. He is a series editor of the Library of Wales and a chair of the Arts Council of Wales. He has written extensively about modern Wales, including Aneurin Bevan and the World of South Wales and Wales: A Question for History. He is also the author of Dream On, In the Frame, and Raymond Williams and the coauthor of A University and Its Community and The Fed: A History of South Wales Miners in the Twentieth Century.