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biography, literary studies and criticism, the short story

Companion to English Literature

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authors, books, literary topics, and cultural issues

The first edition of the Oxford Companion to English Literature was published in 1932, and quickly established itself as the standard source of reference for students and general readers. Since then it has gone through six editions, the latest of which has been hugely updated and expanded. Of course it’s not the sole work of editor Margaret Drabble. She has assembled a team of 140 fairly distinguished authors (all listed) who have written authoritatively on their specialisms.

Oxford Companion to English LiteratureThe entries are biographies of novelists, poets, and dramatists; and there are sketches of well-known philosophers, historians, critics, and biographers. It includes non-English writers such as Balzac, Goethe, and Tolstoy, as well as figures from other genres such as Dürer, Pasolini, and Prokoviev. It includes mini-essays on genres; fictional characters; famous works (Aaron’s Rod to Max Beerbohm’s Zuleika Dobson); famous places, and literary theory.

There are bonuses, such as the special essays on detective, gothic, and historical fiction. It also explains literary genres such as free verse, the epic, metaphors, and naturalism. So if you need a potted account of the differences between ‘New Historicism’ and ‘Cultural Materialism’ for instance, it can be found here, cross-referenced and explained in jargon-free language.

The extras are also entries on significant magazines such as Edinburgh Review and Atlantic Monthly; entries on deconstruction, folios and quartos; the Hogarth Press and Penguin Books; performance poetry and post-colonial literature.

One particularly useful feature is the potted accounts of novels and dramas. I’m fairly sure I will be going back to that, having refreshed my memory of the sprawling plot of Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano as a sort of test case.

So, a typical entry runs as follows. This is a literature-related text which had a huge influence in the Cold War period.

God that Failed, The: Six Studies in Communism, a volume published in 1950, edited by R.H.S.Crossman, which marked a significant point in the reaction against the pro-communist mood of the 1930s. It contained contributions by three ex-communists, *Koestler, *Silone, and R. *Wright, and by three sympathisers, *Gide (presented by Enid *Starkie), Louis Fischer, and *Spender (who had been a party member for a matter of weeks only).

There is a detailed timeline covering the period 1000 to 2005. This lists major literary works, and it also records important events which happened at the same time, to provide a socio-political context. For those of us who were denied a classical education, there’s a generous outline of its main authors, texts, and characters – from Aristophanes and Aristotle to Virgil and Xenophon. There are also appendix lists of poets laureate, plus Nobel, Pulitzer, and Booker Man prizewinners for literature.

This is the sort of reference book which you will grab off the shelf the moment you see a name you don’t recognise, when you want to check the date, the author, or the correct title of a work you see mentioned, or if you want to know about ‘The Battle of Alcazar’ (1594) or ‘The Wreck of the Deutschland’ (1875).

It certainly gets pride of place in my handy revolving bookcase, alongside the great dictionaries and my local A to Z.

© Roy Johnson 2006

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Margaret Drabble (ed), The Oxford Companion to English Literature, (revised sixth edition) Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006, pp.1172, ISBN: 0198614535

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Concise Chronology of English Literature

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what was written and published between 1474 and 2000

What were people writing about as Michelangelo painted the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, or whilst engineers built the first railways in the nineteenth century? This reference book Concise Chronology of English Literature lists the major and some minor works published in every year between 1474 and 2001. Each year in the chronology begins with a list of interesting events, births, and deaths. The later entries also include other cultural items such as films, television productions, and plays.

Chronology of English Literature There’s a big index which lists the authors and all their works listed by date – so you can either see an entry in its chronological context or look up its dating directly. It represents highbrow, middlebrow, and even lowbrow tastes, so the editors have tried to be egalitarian. So for instance, we learn that 1900 saw the birth of the Labour Party; the death of Ruskin, Nietzsche, and Oscar Wilde; and the publication of Elgar’s The Dream of Gerontius, Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim, Bernard Shaw’s Fabianism and the Empire, and H.G.Wells’ Love and Mr Lewisham.

It was also the year which saw the first production of Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya, the Boxer Uprising in China, and the publication of S.R. Crockett’s The Stickit Minister’s Wooing, and Other Galloway Stories – which I have to confess I have never heard of before, and I bet you haven’t either.

Although the entries are short, there is an amazing amount of fine detail. For instance, here are two listings from 1756:

David Hume (1711-76)

The History of Great Britain [vol ii] NF Published 1756, dated 1757. Volume i published 1754 (q.v.) See also History of England 1759

Charlotte Lennox (1729? – 1804) (tr.) The Memoirs of the Countess of Berci F Anonymous. Adapted from L’Histoire tragi-comique de notre temps by Vital d’Audiguier (1569-1624)

The more recent entries – say from 2000 onwards read like a list of best-sellers in the weekend supplements. But then of course, who knows how many of these titles will stand the test of time. Will people still think Zadie Smith’s White Teeth and Anita Brookner’s The Bay of Angels summarised the turn of the century? I somehow doubt it.

On some items there is additional publishing history details which appeals to literary anoraks like me. For instance:

Joseph Conrad (1857-1924)

Youth F

Published on 13 November 1902. Contains ‘Youth’ (first published in Blackwood’s Magazine, September 1898), ‘The Heart of Darkness’ (first published in Blackwood’s Magazine, February 1898), and ‘The End of the Tether’ (first published in Blackwood’s Magazine, July-December 1902).

This is useful information for researchers, historians, and detail specialists. All of which might all sound dry as dust – but the strange thing is that I imagine that this will stay at the front of my desktop bookshelf as a useful resource.

Concise Chronology of English Literature   Buy the book at Amazon UK

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© Roy Johnson 2005

Michael Cox (ed), The Concise Oxford Chronology of English Literature, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2nd revised edition 2005, pp.844, ISBN: 0198610548

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Concise Companion to English Literature

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authors, books, literary topics, and cultural issues

This Concise Companion to English Literature is a cut-down paperback version of Margaret Drabble’s Oxford Companion to English Literature. It’s based on the sixth edition, but it adds 500+ new entries on contemporary writers, ‘women writers’ and literary theorists. The main entries are thumbnail sketches of novelists, poets, and dramatists; but there are also entries representing philosophers, historians, scholars, critics, biographers, travel writers, and journalists.

Concise Companion to English Literature Topics covered include authors (from Abelard to Zola); literary genres (from the Absurd to yellow-backs); characters in fiction, drama, and poetry; famous works (Lawrence’s Aaron’s Rod to Max Beerbohm’s Zuleika Dobson); famous literary places, and concepts in literary theory. There are bonuses, such as the occasional special mini-essays on topics such as biography, or detective, gothic, and historical fiction. It also explains literary genres such as free verse, the epic, metaphors, and naturalism.

It more or less reflects contemporary concerns: Sorley McLean and Marshall McLuhan get far less space than Bernard McLaverty.

The extras are entries on significant magazines such as Edinburgh Review and Atlantic Monthly; entries on deconstruction, folios and quartos; the Hogarth Press and Penguin Books; performance poetry and post-colonial literature.

There are also appendix lists of poets laureate, plus Nobel, Pulitzer, and Booker Man prizewinners for literature.

One useful feature is the potted plots of novels and dramas. I’m fairly sure I will be going back to that, having refreshed my memory of the sprawling plot of Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano.

For those of us who were denied a classical education, there’s a generous outline of its main authors, texts, and characters – from Aristophanes and Aristotle to Virgil and Xenophon.

This is the sort of reference book which you will grab off the shelf the moment you see a name you don’t recognise, when you want to check the date, the author, or the correct title of a work you see mentioned, or if you want to know about ‘The Battle of Alcazar’ (1594) or ‘The Wreck of the Deutschland’ (1875).

© Roy Johnson 2005

Concise Companion to English Literature   Buy the book at Amazon UK

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Margaret Drabble and Jenny Stringer, The Concise Oxford Companion to English Literature, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 3rd edition, 2003, pp.752, ISBN: 0199214921

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Dictionary of Literary Terms

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explanations of the language of literary criticism

Do you want to know the difference between an epic poem and a tragedy? Between ‘classical’ and ‘romantic’? Between ‘naturalism’ and ‘realism’? Chris Baldick’s Dictionary of Literary Terms answers all these questions – and more besides. With entries which range from definitions of abjection to zeugma, it is in fact a guide to a mixture of old-fashioned grammatical terms, traditional drama, literary history, and textual criticism. It contains over 1,200 of the most troublesome literary terms you are likely to encounter. Some of the longer entries and explanations become like short essays on their subject.

Dictionary of Literary TermsHe also includes literary terms which have slipped into everyday use – such as ‘text’ and ‘interpretation’. He gives clear and often witty explanations of terms such as ‘hypertext’, ‘multi-accentuality’, and ‘postmodernism’. He also explains more common figures of speech such as the metaphor (straightforward) and those you can never remember such synecdoche and metonymy (can you really tell the difference between them?)

He also explains literary genres, from ‘the madrigal’ to ‘dirty realism’ and ‘the boddice ripper’, as well as offering potted accounts of theories such as structuralism and hermeneutics.

The latest (third) edition has been expanded and I was glad to see that he has added entry-level web links from OUP’s companion website to the book.

This will appeal to the general reader with an interest in literary studies, but it’s principally a useful reference for the advanced schoolroom or for undergraduates. And in fact – make that teachers too. I’ve had a copy of the first edition on my shelves for years, and I use it all the time.

© Roy Johnson 2008

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Chris Baldick, Concise Dictionary of Literary Terms, Oxford: Oxford University Press, (third edition) 2008, pp.361, ISBN: 0199208271

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Discourse and Ideology in Nabokov’s Prose

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Routledge Harwood Studies in Russian Literature

Vladimir Nabokov’s work has been widely regarded as an elaborate series of linguistic games in which a variety of clever and seductive narrators invite readers to collude in a system of aesthetic and moral beliefs which are held so firmly that to dissent from them would seem like heresy or not playing the game. Editor David Larmour explains the title of this collection of essays as an exploration of the ‘system of power relations in which the author, text, and reader are enmeshed’. In other words, Nabokov’s strategies are seen as open to challenge, with the clear implication that he has been getting away with it for far too long.

Discourse and Ideology in Nabokov's ProseHe is well known for his ‘strong opinions’, and some of his subject matter and authorial attitudes are very often seen as dubious – especially in Lolita, which gets special extended treatment here. Galya Diment starts the collection with her best efforts to defend Edmund Wilson from the damage inflicted on him by Nabokov in their now famous friendship-turned-dispute over the translation of Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin. Then Brian Walter makes a lengthy criticism of Bend Sinister to say not much more than that it is not one of his best novels.

Galina Rylkova reveals a literary precedent for The Eye in a novel by Mikhail Kuzmin called Wings published in 1906. She has no problem in establishing the parallels between the two texts, but most of her lofty interpretive claims are undermined by her failure to see that Nabokov’s narrator Smurov is a self-deceiving liar and a totally unreliable narrator. He is a comic-pathetic character who is a vehicle for one of Nabokov’s most brilliant experiments in narrative – an experiment which was only matched in subtlety by his later Spring in Fialta.

David Larmour contributes an essay which looks at the relationship between sex and sport in Glory. But like many of the other contributors he accepts almost at face value what Nabokov has to say in his introductions – which were written at a later date. There is no acknowledgement of ‘Trust the tale, not the teller’, or ‘Death of the author’, whichever you prefer.

Paul Miller offers a chapter which demonstrates that Kinbote, narrator of Pale Fire is a homosexual – something which I would have thought any reader above the age of fifteen would realise without being told. There are some perceptive analyses of the American crewcut, but not much more than can be accessed by any reasonably attentive reader.

What struck me was how long it takes these writers to say so little. They come from what is now the bygone age of pre-Internet writing – one which persists in the modern world only thanks to the requirements of tenure in the US and the Research Assessment Exercise in the UK.

Tony Moore makes a valiant attempt to offer what he calls a feminist reading of Lolita, even enlisting the help of Camille Paglia, but his argument that Humbert Humbert changes his moral stance and his prose style at the end of the novel doesn’t seem very convincing, especially when it simply ignores the fact that Humbert is guilty of murder.

There’s also a full-on rad fem reading of Lolita from Elizabeth Patnoe which combines personal testimony and high moral outrage in a very unprofessional manner, ignoring any distinction between the worlds of fiction and reality. At the end of a long tortuous argument, one is left wondering why she bothers reading the novel.

She also has an annoying habit of describing almost every narrative twist as ‘doubling’ – a term she uses indiscriminately as a synonym for ‘ambiguous’, ‘dubious’, ‘disingenuous’, ‘devious’, ‘evasive’, and other related terms.

Fortunately the collection is rounded off by two sensible chapters by Donald Johnson and Suellen Stringer-Hye which place Nabokov in the context of popular culture and America in the 1960s. The collection is based on papers given at an academic conference. It’s obviously one for the literary specialist, but Nabokov enthusiasts will not want to miss it – even if it’s to sharpen their own critical analysis against the views being expressed.

© Roy Johnson 2004

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David H.J.Larmour (ed), Discourse and Ideology in Nabokov’s Prose, London: Routledge, 2002, pp.176, ISBN 0415286581

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Doing Creative Writing

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a guide for undergraduate and postgraduate students

Can creative writing actually be taught? Well – judging from the number of college and university courses devoted to the subject, and the number of books written about it, the answer appears to be ‘Why not?’ Steve May teaches at Bath Spa University , and Doing Creative Writing is an attempt to support students whilst they choose a suitable course, what to expect when they embark on it, how to organise themselves as writers, and what possibilities exist for a writer once the course has finished.

Doing Creative WritingApart from having the desire to write, not many students know what is involved in the process. His first two chapters argue the case for teaching creative writing against the advice of such lofty figures as Henry James, who believed that it could not be taught.

He uses music as an analogy: nobody would expect to pick up a clarinet (as they might a pen) and perform a Mozart concerto without learning how to play the instrument first.

The next section will be of vital interest to anyone planning to study creative writing in higher education. He looks at the way it is taught in the US and the UK; he explains the variety of reasons why such courses are offered; and he provides guidance for judging the calibre of the people teaching the subject. Not many people realise that some of the best ‘qualified’ (published writers) might well be employed on a part-time basis and paid at hourly rates.

When you’ve enrolled on your course, what can you expect to happen? You’ll have to get used to the idea of the seminar or workshop in which you’ll be expected to present your own work and have it discussed by fellow students. He gives advice on how to handle the feedback you will be given – and how to give your own when you in your turn become ‘the audience’.

He tackles head-on the often vexed issue of assessment in creative work. Be warned! These workshops might form part of your assessment – so don’t think these sessions are an easy option where you can sit back and just listen. He shows real-life examples of the criteria UK and US institutions use, and he emphasises the element of self-assessment or reflective writing which is common to both.

The last part of the book is dedicated to the techniques of creative writing – where to write, how to write, what to write about, what materials to use, and how to present the finished work.

He also includes some real-life case studies of students who have taken creative writing courses and the variety of paths their careers have taken; and finally there’s a useful bunch of recommendations for further reading.

This is a useful adjunct to books which focus on the techniques of creative writing (such as Ailsa Cox’s recent Writing Short Stories) and it’s obviously aimed at students with ambitions in creative writing course who may not know which course to choose – or what to expect when they get there.

© Roy Johnson 2007

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Steve May, Doing Creative Writing, London: Routledge, 2007, pp.152, ISBN: 0415402392

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Doing English

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preparing for literary studies at undergraduate level

This book is designed to make students of literature think more deeply about the subject. It explains the development of English Literature as an academic discipline and poses fundamental questions about the activity – such as ‘What is English [Literature] and what is studying it supposed to mean?’ Robert Eaglestone’s book aims to help students prepare for studying literature at undergraduate level. He offers a gentle introduction to literary theory – but without lots of jargon.

Doing English If students read what he has to say, they will certainly be more confident in confronting some of the challenges and contradictions which exist in literary studies in universities. For instance, tutors commonly deduct marks from students for poor written expression – and quite right too. Yet why do so many literary critics get published when their work is almost unintelligible? These are questions worth asking. He explains the rise in ‘Eng Lit’ and uncovers some of the hidden assumptions which lie beneath the surface of traditional attitudes to it. This is in fact an explanation of the ideology of ‘Eng. Lit.’ – but he cleverly avoids even using the term.

He unpacks the concept of the literary canon and looks in detail at Shakespeare studies as a prime example. This is followed by issues of interpretation which are summed up in the expressions ‘the intentional fallacy’ and ‘the death of the author’.

The latter parts of the book are devoted to considering the relationships between English Literature and cultural identity, politics, and educational policy. His consideration of these larger strategic issues make me think that this book will be as valuable to teachers as to students. It will help them clarify their ideas about their objectives and teaching strategies in the classroom.

There is an excellent and deeply annotated bibliography. Any student [or teacher] reading even a few of the titles he recommends will be well prepared to put their own approach to literary studies into a well-informed ideological context. [But they don’t have to mention the term.]

© Roy Johnson 2009

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Robert Eaglestone, Doing English: A guide for literature students, London: Routledge, 3rd edition 2009, pp.192, ISBN: 0415284236

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Edith Wharton short stories

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tutorials, critical commentary, and study resources

Edith Wharton published more than eighty short stories during her writing career. The exact number is debatable, because some are so long (such as the early tale, The Touchstone) that they can be counted as novellas. She certainly produced stories regularly from 1900 until her last collection Ghosts in 1937. During that time she also wrote a number of full length novels, as well as works of non-fiction, such as her travel writing, her war memoirs, and books on the design of house interiors and gardens. The following are tutorials and study guides which offer plot summaries, characters, critical commentaries, and suggestions for further reading on each story. The list will be updated as new stories are added.

Edith Wharton stories   After Holbein
Edith Wharton stories   Afterward
Edith Wharton stories   Autres Temps
Edith Wharton stories   Bunner Sisters
Edith Wharton short stories   Confession
Edith Wharton short stories   Diagnosis
Edith Wharton short stories   His Father’s Son
Edith Wharton short stories   Kerfol
Edith Wharton short stories   Pomegranate Seed
Edith Wharton short stories   Roman Fever
Edith Wharton short stories   Sanctuary
Edith Wharton short stories   Souls Belated
Edith Wharton short stories   The Angel at the Grave
Edith Wharton short stories   The Last Asset
Edith Wharton short stories   The Long Run
Edith Wharton short stories   The Muse’s Tragedy
Edith Wharton short stories   The Other Two
Edith Wharton short stories   The Portrait
Edith Wharton short stories   The Pretext
Edith Wharton short stories   The Reckoning
Edith Wharton short stories   The Touchstone
Edith Wharton short stories   The Triumph of Night
Edith Wharton short stories   The Verdict
Edith Wharton short stories   Xingu

Video documentary

Study resources

The Triumph of Night Edith Wharton Collected Stories – Norton Critical – Amazon UK

The Triumph of Night Edith Wharton Collected Stories – Norton Critical – Amazon US

Edith Wharton - biography Edith Wharton – biography

Edith Wharton - Wikipedia Edith Wharton at Wikipedia – biographical notes, links

Edith Wharton - tutorials Edith Wharton at Mantex – tutorials, biography, study resources

Edith Wharton - tutorials Edith Wharton’s Short Stories – publication details

Edith Wharton's writing

Edith Wharton’s writing

Further reading

Louis Auchincloss, Edith Wharton: A Woman of her Time, New York: Viking, 1971,

Elizabeth Ammons, Edith Wharton’s Argument with America, Georgia: University of Georgia Press, 1982, pp.222. ISBN: 0820305138

Janet Beer, Edith Wharton (Writers & Their Work), New York: Northcote House, 2001, pp.99, ISBN: 0746308981

Millicent Bell (ed), The Cambridge Companion to Edith Wharton, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995, pp.232, ISBN: 0521485134

Alfred Bendixen and Annette Zilversmit (eds), Edith Wharton: New Critical Essays, New York: Garland, 1992, pp.329, ISBN: 0824078489

Eleanor Dwight, Edith Wharton: An Extraordinary Life, New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1994, ISBN: 0810927950

Gloria C. Erlich, The Sexual Education of Edith Wharton, California: University of California Press, 1992, pp.223, ISBN: 0520075838

Susan Goodman, Edith Wharton’s Women: Friends and Rivals, UPNE, 1990, pp.220, ISBN: 0874515246

Irving Howe, (ed), Edith Wharton: A collection of Critical Essays, London: University of North Carolina Press, 1986,

Jennie A. Kassanoff, Edith Wharton and the Politics of Race, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004, pp.240, ISBN: 0521830893

Hermione Lee, Edith Wharton, London: Vintage, new edition 2008, pp.864, ISBN: 0099763516

R.W.B. Lewis, Edith Wharton: A Biography, New York: Harper and Rowe, 1975, pp.592, ISBN: 0880640200

James W. Tuttleton (ed), Edith Wharton: The Contemporary Reviews, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992, pp.586, ISBN: 0521383196

Candace Waid, Edith Wharton’s Letters from the Underworld, London: University of North Carolina Press, 1991,

Sarah Bird Wright, Edith Wharton A to Z: The Essential Reference to Her Life and Work, Fact on File, 1998, pp.352, ISBN: 0816034818

Cynthia Griffin Wolff, A Feast of Words: The Triumph of Edith Wharton, New York: Perseus Books, second edition 1994, pp.512, ISBN: 0201409186

Other works by Edith Wharton

Edith Wharton - The Custom of the CountryThe Custom of the Country (1913) is Edith Wharton’s satiric anatomy of American society in the first decade of the twentieth century. It follows the career of Undine Spragg, recently arrived in New York from the midwest and determined to conquer high society. Glamorous, selfish, mercenary and manipulative, her principal assets are her striking beauty, her tenacity, and her father’s money. With her sights set on an advantageous marriage, Undine pursues her schemes in a world of shifting values, where triumph is swiftly followed by disillusion. This is a study of modern ambition and materialism written a hundred years before its time.
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Edith Wharton - The House of MirthThe House of Mirth (1905) is the story of Lily Bart, who is beautiful, poor, and still unmarried at twenty-nine. In her search for a husband with money and position she betrays her own heart and sows the seeds of the tragedy that finally overwhelms her. The book is a disturbing analysis of the stifling limitations imposed upon women of Wharton’s generation. In telling the story of Lily Bart, who must marry to survive, Wharton recasts the age-old themes of family, marriage, and money in ways that transform the traditional novel of manners into an arresting modern document of cultural anthropology.

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© Roy Johnson 2014

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Fictions

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short stories of fantasy, parody, mystery, and satire

Fictions (1944) is a single-volume compilation of two collections of short stories which made Jorge Luis Borges famous – his 1941 publication The Garden of Forking Paths and the 1944 follow-up Artifices. He is one of the few writers to achieve international fame merely on the strength of short stories (Katherine Mansfield was another rare case).

Fictions

His approach is distinctly playful. The stories are in the form of fantasies, essays on imaginary objects, fake biographies, bibliographic parodies, detective stories, and a form he is particularly fond of – commentaries on other people’s work, real and imaginary. He defends this approach in a typically witty manner:

It is a laborious madness and an impoverishing one, the madness of composing vast books — setting out in five hundred pages an idea that can be perfectly related orally in five minutes. The better way to go about it is to pretend that these books already exist, and offer a commentary on them.

This illustrates the ironic, tongue-in-cheek approach he brings to the short story form. He is also keen on blurring the distinction between fiction and reality. A story might begin by referring to the real world or a well known text, but he then blends it with fictional inventions or fanciful distortions which produce an effect like philosophic mind games. As a reader, you are suddenly no longer sure in which conceptual plane the narrative is taking place.

As a former librarian, he frequently highlights the bibliographic elements of his creations. He offers academic references (often spurious) for the sources of his information and bogus but amusing footnotes to support the authenticity of his narratives .

Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius is a story in which Borges and his friend Bioy Casares (a real Argentinean writer) find one volume of an encyclopaedia that documents an imaginary world. It has been written by a collective of scholars working in secret. The language of this world has no nouns, there are no sciences, and one of the many schools of its philosophy denies the existence of time. The story has a postscript explaining how the project was later expanded to produce the invention of an entire planet. This at first appears to be a failure, but then physical objects from this imaginary world begin to appear in the fictional ‘present’.

In Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote, a French belle-lettrist decides to re-write the whole of Cervantes’ Don Quixote, word for word from scratch. The story has an amusing defence that claims his reproduction (of which he only manages a couple of chapters) is more subtle than the original – because it was written three hundred years later. This conceit prefigures a school of literary criticism (Cultural Materialism) which argues that the meaning of a text is influenced both by the time in which it was produced as well as the time in which it is read.

In The Circular Ruins a man crawls into a primitive temple with the task of dreaming another person into being. He eventually manages it – first the heart, then the lungs, and so on. This being becomes his ‘son’, and he worries that his creation might come to realise that he is the projection of somebody else’s dream. When he tries to escape from this metaphysical problem, he suddenly realises that somebody else is dreaming him.

The Lottery of Babylon is a Kafka-like invention of a society run on pure chance, in which everyone is compelled to participate. Lots are drawn which might result in torture, death, or infinite riches. But even the administration of the results are subject to chance, and might be carried out at random, reversed, or simply ignored.

Another plot device favoured by Borges is the point of view reversal or the hidden narrator – such as the Irish republican in The Shape of the Sword who tells the story of how he saved the life of a coward during the civil war. He protects his comrade from his abject fear, only to find that the man has betrayed him to the Black and Tans. When the narrator is brought before a firing squad for execution the story turns itself inside out to reveal that the narrator is in fact the coward.

Funes, the Memorious is the potted biography of a poor young Argentinean boy who has a memory so prodigious that he cannot forget anything. As a child Ireneo Funes always knows exactly what time it is at any moment and can remember trivial events with chronological exactitude. He is thrown off a horse, crippled, and when he recovers he discovers that his memory is virtually infinite. He can remember the shape of clouds on any particular day, the pattern of the leaves on a tree, or the veins of decorative marbling in a book he has only seen once.

Whilst the stories are marvellously inventive, it has to be said that they are not uniformly consistent in quality. Some are formless and not much more than self-indulgent whimsy. But the best are tightly wrought and well constructed, with no superfluous material at all – just as a good short story should be. Borges went on to produce an enormously varied body of work – essays, poetry, translations, lectures, film and book reviews – in addition to his now-famous stories. But this collection Fictions remains what might be called his ‘signature’ work.

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© Roy Johnson 2015

Jorge Luis Borges, Fictions, London: Penguin Classics, 2000, pp.179, ISBN: 0141183845

Jorge Louis Borges links

Fictions Jorge Luis Borges – biography

Fictions Borges Center – University of Pittsburgh

Fictions BBC Radio 4 audio documentary

Fictions Paris Review – Interview

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Good Fiction Guide

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reference guide and essays on ideas for further reading

Do you like reading good quality fiction – but you’re not sure what to read next? Good Fiction Guide is designed for you. It’s combination of short essays describing popular literary genres and topics, with lists of suggested reading. It then adds potted biographies of writers, with tips on which of their works are most approachable. The general idea is to lead you onto any number of recommendations for ‘further reading’, all of which will be of good quality.

Good Fiction Guide This is because they are by classic writers – Balzac, Dickens, Turgenev, Woolf – or because their contemporary writing is of a literary kind – Salman Rushdie, Angela Carter, Julian Barnes. So it’s a good mixture of the traditional and the new. The book begins with thirty-four articles on a mixture of genres – short story, fantasy – place – France, Canada – and topics such as ‘war’, ‘humour’, and ‘the sea’. These are written by enthusiasts who range from academics to popular writers, and each one includes their top twelve recommended titles.

The bulk of the book is taken up with over a thousand thumbnail sketches of writers and their best-known work. Clive James cheek by jowl with Henry James and Thomas Hardy followed by Robert Harris.

The emphasis is firmly on modern and contemporary literature, and I suspect that despite the introductory essays, most readers will find the biographies the ideal ground for browsing and picking up ideas for further reading. They also make this compilation a reasonable quick reference book for those concerned with modern literature.

© Roy Johnson 2005

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Good Fiction Guide, (ed Jane Rogers) Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2nd edition 2005, pp.548, ISBN: 0192806475

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