A host of short story collections photographed against a red background

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Reading lists

12 short story collections to sink into

Selected and Introduced by Tessa Hadley

The Selected Stories of Elizabeth Bowen

Bowen's stories show the awesome capabilities of the English language and the surprise and mystery of the human soul

Bowen's stories are novels that have been split open like rocks and reveal the glitter of the naked crystals which have formed them

Like Woolf, like Spark, her language is clear but her effects complex, creating shimmering reflections of reality, her world recognisable but just out of reach

[Bowen's] fiction's uniqueness lies in its versatile, modern understanding of place as 'inner landscape'... [an] astute selection of the short stories... [Brown] write[s] fiction with the texture of history

Elizabeth Bowen (Author) Elizabeth Bowen was born in Dublin in 1899, the only child of an Irish lawyer and landowner. She travelled a great deal, dividing most of her time between London and Bowen's Court, the family house in County Cork which she inherited. Her first book, a collection of short stories, Encounters, was published in 1923. The Hotel (1927) was her first novel. She was awarded the CBE in 1948, and received honorary degrees from Trinity College, Dublin in 1949, and from Oxford University in 1956. The Royal Society of Literature made her a Companion of Literature in 1965. She died in 1973. Tessa Hadley (Introducer) Tessa Hadley is the author of eight highly praised novels, Accidents in the Home, which was longlisted for the Guardian First Book Award, Everything Will Be All Right, The Master Bedroom, The London Train, Clever Girl, The Past, Late in the Day, Free Love and three collections of stories, Sunstroke, Married Love and Bad Dreams. She won the Windham Campbell Prize for Fiction in 2016, The Past won the Hawthornden Prize for 2016, and Bad Dreams won the 2018 Edge Hill Short Story Prize. Her stories appear regularly in the New Yorker.

'Bowen's stories are novels that have been split open like rocks and reveal the glitter of the naked crystals which have formed them' Vogue 
 
SELECTED AND WITH A NEW INTRODUCTION BY TESSA HADLEY 
 
A girl shares her secret den. A couple stroll through a ruined city. A man walks into a ladies' hat shop. A teacher dreams of killing her pupil. 
 
Spanning the 1920s to the post-war years, this new selection brings Elizabeth Bowen's finest short stories together for the first time. Elegant and subtle, they showcase Bowen's ability to evoke ineffable emotions - grief, nostalgia, self-consciousness, dread - and combine remarkable psychological insight with vivid settings, from the countryside of Bowen's native Ireland to the streets of her London home after the Blitz. 
 
Encompassing characters from many walks of life and a vast array of moods, these are intricate journeys of domesticity and discovery, of the homely and uncanny, of the mind and body.

Collected Stories

Elizabeth Bowen

A beautiful hardback edition of the collected stories of one of the best short-story writers ever, with a new introduction by John Banville.

She is a major writer; her name should appear on any responsible list of the ten most important fiction writers in English on this side of the Atlantic in this century. She is what happened after Bloomsbury ... the link that connects Virginia Woolf with Irish Murdoch and Muriel Spark.

Bowen's stories show the awesome capabilities of the English language and the surprise and mystery of the human soul.

Bowen's stories are novels that have been split open like rocks and reveal the glitter of  the naked crystals which have formed them.

A brilliant and much admired novelist, Elizabeth Bowen (1899–1973) surpassed herself as a writer of short fiction: 'the supreme genius of her time', writes John Banville in his introduction; 'There is not a story in this substantial volume ... that is not brought off beautifully.'  A substantial volume indeed, Including 79 stories written over four decades, ranging in setting from the County Cork of the author's Anglo-Irish childhood to bomb-ravaged London where she coolly sat out the War, evoked with vivid and impeccable artistry. She has a disturbing sense of the uncanny, an acute eye for social comedy and her often emotionally secretive characters are depicted with penetrating psychological insight. She is good at houses, ghosts, children, animals ... 900 pages of sheer delight

Friends And Relations

A tangle of friends and relations gives us Bowen's most personal and domestic novel

Bowen is a tough old bird. And once you're on her side, it's going to be a loyal alliance. Because it's nice to have a writer who will never lie to you. Not even to make you feel a little better

Bowen wrote numerous great novels, including Friends and Relations...about how telephones have infiltrated our thinking and desires: waiting for a call, being interrupted by a call, not knowing what might be announced

There is much to savour, enjoy, intrigue and shock in this wonderful novel. Bowen is sublime

Elizabeth Bowen was born in Dublin in 1899, the only child of an Irish lawyer and landowner. She was educated at Downe House School in Kent. Her book Bowen's Court (1942) is the history of her family and their house in County Cork, and Seven Winters (1943) contains reminiscences of her Dublin childhood. In 1923 she married Alan Cameron, who held an appointment with the BBC and who died in 1952. She travelled a good deal, dividing most of her time between London and Bowen's Court, which she inherited. 
 
Elizabeth Bowen is considered by many to be one of the most distinguished novelists of the twentieth century. Her first book, a collection of short stories, Encounters, appeared in 1923, followed by another, Ann Lee's, in 1926. The Hotel(1927) was her first novel, and was followed by The Last September (1929), Joining Charles(1929), another book of short stories, Friends and Relations (1931), To the North (1932), The Cat Jumps (short stories, 1934), The House in Paris(1935), The Death of the Heart (1938), Look at All Those Roses (short stories, 1941), The Demon Lover (short stories, 1945), The Heat of the Day(1949), Collected Impressions (essays, 1950), The Shelborne (1951), A World of Love (1955), A Time in Rome (1960), Afterthought (essays, 1962), The Little Girls (1964), A Day in the Dark(1965) and her last book Eva Trout (1969). 
 
She was awarded the CBE in 1948, and received honorary degrees from Trinity College, Dublin in 1949, and from Oxford University in 1956. In the same year she was appointed Lacy Martin Donnelly Fellow at Bryn Mawr College in the United States. The Royal Society of Literature made her a Companion of Literature in 1965. Elizabeth Bowen died in 1973.

Two sisters, two weddings, just months apart. These marriages produce a tangle of friends, relations and lovers that starts to unravel ten years later, during one intense week. Two of Bowen’s most memorable characters are in attendance: Lady Elfrida, a creature of privilege, and Theodora Thirdman, a gawky teenager with zero self-awareness. The sunset of prosperity is upon this complacent, moneyed class, but Bowen’s precise and beautiful prose pins real pain and comedy upon its inhabitants.

A World Of Love

Intense and emotional, the story of a young girl's romantic awakening

A packet of letters, found in an attic, leads young Jane into the world of love. The attic is in Montefort, a corroding country house in County Cork, which harbours a collection of people held there by ties of kinship or habit, and haunted by the memory of its former owner. During a hot and dry summer, Jane pursues her romantic imaginings, while not far off the rich, promiscuous Lady Latterly waits to play her part in Jane's awakening.

The Shelbourne

The history of Dublin's famous Shelbourne Hotel, told by one of Ireland's most brilliant novelists

For Elizabeth Bowen, the world-famous novelist (who wrote a book about it), the Shelbourne was the "prototype for all large hotels - I cannot help comparing all others with it. Perhaps indeed in no other capital city does any one hotel play such an outstanding role"

Elizabeth Bowen takes us on a tour through the history of the famous Dublin landmark, the Shelbourne Hotel, in this evocative account of Irish life. Looking out on Dublin as if from the windows of the Shelbourne, and then turning inward to witness the impact of events on the hotel, its guests and staff, Bowen paints a picture of what was, in the hotel's earlier days, the second city of the Empire, then the battleground of Irish independence and civil strife, and eventually the capital of a republic.

Bowen's Court & Seven Winters

'Bowen had a genius for conveying the reader straight into the most powerful and complex regions of the heart. On that terrain, she was bold, empathetic and merciless' - New York Times

She startles us by sheer originality of mind and boldness of sensibility into seeking our world afresh

Bowen's Court describes the history of one Anglo-Irish family in County Cork from the Cromwellian settlement until 1959, when Elizabeth Bowen was forced to sell the family house she loved. Bowen reviews ten generations of her family, representatives of the Protestant Irish gentry whose lives were dominated by property, lawsuits, formidable matriarchs, violent conflicts, hunting, drinking, and self-destructive fantasies. 
 
Seven Winters recalls with endearing candour Bowen's family and her Dublin childhood as seen through the eyes of a child who could not read till she was seven and who fed her imagination only on sights and sounds.

Both of its time and timeless, a spy tale and a haunting love story... She is the supreme mid-century anatomist of the heart, with a unique sensitivity to the lives of ordinary English men and women in extremis

Her novels and essays are alive with the erotic tensions of the blackout, the Blitz and the heightened pleasures of sex in the proximity of death. Preternaturally sensitive to colour, light and detail, she caught the nuances of the unnameable new sensations Londoners experienced

Stylistically intense…[a] richly atmospheric portrait of a city and its residents under constant threat. It has a cast of memorable female characters who outshine the men

A haunting portrayal of love and betrayal in a London hollowed by war. 
 
It is wartime London, and the carelessness of people with no future flows through the evening air. Stella discovers that her lover Robert is suspected of selling information to the enemy. Harrison, the British intelligence agent on his trail, wants to bargain, the price for his silence being Stella herself. Caught between two men and unsure who she can trust, the flimsy structures of Stella's life begin to crumble. 
 
&lsquo;Alive with the erotic tensions of the blackout, the Blitz and the heightened pleasures of sex in the proximity of death&rsquo; London Review of Books 
 
WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY ROY FOSTER 
 
This series of war novels from Vintage Classics presents eight powerful stories about the horror and waste of war - each a passionate plea to prevent its repetition

Elizabeth Bowen

Praise for The Heat of the Day

Both of its time and timeless, a spy tale and a haunting love story... She is the supreme mid-century anatomist of the heart, with a unique sensitivity to the lives of ordinary English men and women in extremis

Her novels and essays are alive with the erotic tensions of the blackout, the Blitz and the heightened pleasures of sex in the proximity of death. Preternaturally sensitive to colour, light and detail, she caught th ...

Stylistically intense…[a] richly atmospheric portrait of a city and its residents under constant threat. It has a cast of memorable female characters who outshine the men

Both of its time and timeless, a spy tale and a haunting love story... She is the supreme mid-century anatomist of the heart, with a unique sensitivity to the lives of ordinary English men and women in extremis

Her novels and essays are alive with the erotic tensions of the blackout, the Blitz and the heightened pleasures of sex in the proximity of death. Preternaturally sensitive to colour, light and detail, she caught th ...

Stylistically intense…[a] richly atmospheric portrait of a city and its residents under constant threat. It has a cast of memorable female characters who outshine the men

Both of its time and timeless, a spy tale and a haunting love story... She is the supreme mid-century anatomist of the heart, with a unique sensitivity to the lives of ordinary English men and women in extremis

Her novels and essays are alive with the erotic tensions of the blackout, the Blitz and the heightened pleasures of sex in the proximity of death. Preternaturally sensitive to colour, light and detail, she caught th ...

Stylistically intense…[a] richly atmospheric portrait of a city and its residents under constant threat. It has a cast of memorable female characters who outshine the men

Books by Elizabeth Bowen

Series by Elizabeth Bowen

Against War8 Books

Everyman’s Library Contemporary Classics169 Books

Articles featuring Elizabeth Bowen

12 short story collections to sink into

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