The author of Any Human Heart returns with a new collection of 14 short stories, many centering on musicians, writers, and artists.
Critic Reviews
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Outstanding
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Boston Globe Ann Harleman
The insights arrived at in Boyd's stories are experienced rather than merely witnessed. They strike deep, and they stick.
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Outstanding
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Daily Telegraph David Robson
For those who enjoy what might loosely be called canapé fiction - delicious little morsels that whet the appetite but never sate it - Fascination is a must-read book. Every one of the 16 stories has the patina of craftsmanship.
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Outstanding
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San Francisco Chronicle David Abrams
His breadth and depth and control are simply breathtaking here and throughout the entire collection.
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Outstanding
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The Globe And Mail [Toronto] Martin Levin
A remarkably elastic, eclectic work... Boyd has never been afraid to stretch himself, either thematically or stylistically, and the range of narrative architecture in Fascination is dazzling.
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Favorable
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The Guardian M John Harrison
[Boyd] believes we encode ourselves as our own compulsive or repetitive actions, then act out our characters by acting out of character. As demonstrations of this, the stories collected here are perfect.
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Favorable
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Los Angeles Times Richard Eder
The stories in William Boyd's collection are strung along a charm bracelet; looked at closely, most of the charms turn out to be tiny figurines with elegantly malevolent expressions. [9 Jan 2005, p.R7]
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Favorable
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Village Voice Ed Park
And the genres are also, gleefully, all over the map.
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Favorable
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Salon Amy Reiter
And while, at points, the frequent soundings of the same themes teeter on the edge of growing tiresome, Boyd snatches them back from the brink by imbuing each story with enough freshness to not only hold his readers' interest but to pass along to them the fascination he clearly has with the quirky characters of his creation.
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Mixed
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Washington Post Carolyn See
Elegant, sometimes pretentious stories.
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Mixed
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Chicago Tribune Art Winslow
Yet if the glow dies for Boyd's characters as their lives rend in varied ways, from Logan Mountstuart to Yves Hill, they help keep it alive for us.
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Mixed
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Publishers Weekly
Boyd's characters are, as a general rule, seeking--and mostly failing--to attain the intensity of some similar imaginative act.
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Mixed
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Kirkus Reviews
Thin stuff overall, though. One wonders whether most of these were ideas for unwritten novels.
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Unfavorable
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The Independent James Urquhart
My biggest disquiet about Fascination is that only about a third of the stories are distinctively good. This is not enough. Most are adequate; one ("Beulah Berlin, an A-Z") is just terrible.
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Unfavorable
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The New York Times Book Review David Gates
But if he wants [his stories] to do what I want a story to do -- to please the reader aesthetically, to move him emotionally, to pique her intellectually -- they don't work for me.
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