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Outstanding
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Chicago Tribune Alan Cheuse
That's where this entire collection abides, quite beyond the ordinary. Like the summer light in Iceland, it offers endless shifts and reshadings of color, and for readers who have not had the experience of reading Byatt, the book will startle with all the intensity of a shrill cry of a doorbell in the dead of night. [25 April 2004, Page C3]
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Outstanding
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Kirkus Reviews
Byatt has never written better than in these exquisite stories that, together and thus arranged, assume the shape of a life from childhood through old age and death. A stunning, altogether irresistible collection.
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Outstanding
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Los Angeles Times Jane Ciabattari
These bewitching stories are immensely readable, fiercely intelligent and studded with astonishing refracting images. "Little Black Book of Stories" is a virtuoso performance by a master storyteller; Byatt spins pure gold from the darkest elements in our nature. [9 May 2004; Page R4]
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Outstanding
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Publishers Weekly
With an accomplished balance of quotidian detail and eloquent flights of imagination, Byatt has crafted a powerful new collection.
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Outstanding
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The Guardian Ali Smith
Little Black Book of Stories is tough and good, stony in all the best ways, vitally not nice. It is her finest collection yet.
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Outstanding
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The Nation Maria Margaronis
All five stories here are intimate with the uncanny, animating it in eerie, fleshly forms.
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Outstanding
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The New York Times Book Review Claire Messud
Byatt has the sheer narrative skill to raise the hairs on the back of your neck and make your pulse race. In this fine and memorable collection, she attains a near perfect balance between low and high, body and mind, the Thing and its significance.
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Outstanding
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Booklist Donna Seaman
Byatt is commanding, Her prose is crisp and astringent. Her insights are lacerating, her approach sly, her visions searing, her wit honed, and her imagination peripatetic and larcenous, feasting on art, myth, fairy tales, and science.
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Favorable
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Boston Globe Siddhartha Deb
If the turns taken by the narrative are fantastic, Byatt's choice of setting... emphasizes the solidity of the world her stories begin from. This is, in part, a matter of a writer using the environment she knows best, but it also ensures that we do not psychoanalyze the characters.
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Favorable
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The Onion A.V. Club Noel Murray
Byatt sketches her characters with an extremely British sense of certainty and dichotomy, sometimes to a fault. Like a lot of her countrymen in the dramatic and literary arts, Byatt divides the classes a little too neatly, giving her upper crust a deep sensitivity and crippling reserve, and her working classes a streak of noble vulgarity.
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Favorable
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The Spectator Stephen Abell
It is a welcome departure for the author, an erstwhile chronicler of folk tales and legends, who this time appears to have her eye on something more edgily modern, more relevant and, therefore, far more intriguing than expected.
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Favorable
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The Guardian David Jays
This black (fairy) book is very dark indeed, but also an elegant distillation of everything that makes Byatt peerless.
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Favorable
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The Independent Nicola Smyth
These narratives of transformation, which is the essence of the fairy story, mix the familiar with "things that are more real than we are". There's nothing Victorian or pre-Raphaelite about them, although they often lack the form's charm.
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Favorable
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The Independent Mary Flanagan
Reading short stories can be an unsatisfying business. Easily digestible in one gulp, they can leave you longing for the meat of a real novel. But AS Byatt's latest volume provides a refreshing antidote to all that.
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Favorable
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Daily Telegraph Cressida Connolly
Little Black Book of Stories is the ideal primer for anyone who has not yet discovered AS Byatt, and a delight for those who have.
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Favorable
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Daily Telegraph Katie Owen
These little stories by one of Britain's foremost grandes dames of the writing world are a delightful surprise, packing a much greater punch than many full-length novels.
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Favorable
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Entertainment Weekly Jennifer Reese
In this wintry, supremely elegant collection, Byatt (Possession) peels back the surface of everyday life -- and what she reveals may disturb your sleep.
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Mixed
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San Francisco Chronicle Laurel Maury
It's a mark of Byatt's wisdom that she likes to pose questions, not give answers. She wants you to do your own thinking. She's like some pursed-lipped librarian or tough English prof, but a bit too familiar with darkness, stones, the occult and trolls.
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Mixed
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Sydney Morning Herald Daphne Guiness
Two good stories out of five earns a bronze, not a gold, star... But is this bagful of shorts Byatt's best? I think not.
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Mixed
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Washington Post Carolyn See
You can't really complain about this book. Buy it for your mother, father, lover. They won't be able to complain about it, either. They won't have the nerve.
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