Victoria Hislop’s collection of favourite short stories by other female writers, simply titled The Story has given me more pleasure this year than almost all the rest of my reading put together. Like a box of festive Quality Street, you can dip in and never be sure what you will encounter – it might be Virginia Woolf or Alice Munro, this year’s Nobel Prize for Literature winner. Hislop highlights some of the very best writing of the past 200 years, with topics that range far and wide, from humour to pathos, and politics to sex.

Mariella Frostrup
Mail on Sunday: Books of the Year

Witty, heartbreaking, shocking, satirical: the short story can excite or sadden, entice or repulse. The one thing it can never be is dull.  Author Victoria Hislop, a passionate ambassador for the art of the short story, has hand-picked one hundred stories from the very best women writers, bringing them together in a beautifully produced volume, with a personal introduction.

The Story features two centuries of women’s short fiction, ranging from established masters Alice Munro and Angela Carter, to contemporary rising stars such as Miranda July and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.   Divided thematically into collections on love, loss and the lives of women, the reader will find a story for every mood, mind-set and moment in life.

‘While gathering the short stories for this anthology, I have read some of the most brilliant and profound pieces of writing that I have ever come across. The authors in this anthology range from a Nobel Prize winner, Doris Lessing, to the acknowledged queen of short stories, Alice Munro. There are Man Booker winners, Costa winners and Pulitzer winners. A few were born in the 19th century but the majority are more modern. Several of them are as yet unknown, others are household names, like Virginia Woolf. Many of the most vivid and passionate storytellers are young. And without doubt many of the most powerfully original are contemporary writers …

Random reading recommendation: The Story: Love, Loss & The Lives of Women: 100 Great Short Stories edited by @VicHislop . A rich feast.

— Nigella Lawson (@Nigella_Lawson) April 21, 2014

 

Praise for “The Story”

Victoria Hislop’s collection of favourite short stories by other female writers, simply titled The Story has given me more pleasure this year than almost all the rest of my reading put together. Like a box of festive Quality Street, you can dip in and never be sure what you will encounter – it might be Virginia Woolf or Alice Munro, this year’s Nobel Prize for Literature winner. Hislop highlights some of the very best writing of the past 200 years, with topics that range far and wide, from humour to pathos, and politics to sex.
Books of the Year: Mariella Frostrup, Mail on Sunday

“This huge, beautiful book is a treasure chest of 100 women’s short stories chosen by Victoria Hislop. There are classics, such as Elizabeth Taylor’s The Blush and Katherine Mansfield’s The Canary. In fact, the index reads like a roll-call of the best female writers of the past century, from Virginia Woolf to Hilary Mantel. Alongside Helen Simpson’s brilliant Up at a Villa, in which heartless teenagers get a vision of their future selves, there’s Muriel Spark’s The First Year of My Life, in which a baby narrates the world events of 1918. Relative newbies such as Lucy Wood (Diving Belles) and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (The Thing Around Your Neck) more than-hold their own beside thundering names such as Alice Munro, Nadine Gordimer and Margaret Drabble. A collection so good, it’s essential.”
The Times.

In this beautiful and vast collection, Victoria Hislop has pas picked her  glitter­ing line-up of authors to include Nobel Laureates, Man Booker, Pulitzer and Costa prize winners.[…] these sto­ries are all written by women and represent some of the finest modern writers in the English language. Otherwise, the scope is wide, rich and often unexpected: a collection of fluffy chick-lit this is not.

Perhaps as an early means to defy preconceptions, Hislop picks Katherine Mansfield’s incomplete “An Unmarried Man’s Story” as her appetiser. Employing a male narra­tor and a modernist structure, Mansfield’s abstract style is challeng­ing but rewarding. Her fragmented glimpses of past and present create an authentic circularity in the search for reality. Other writers also use the male narrator, but no one as frankly as AM Homes, whose brilliant story opens with a man analysing his man­hood; “I am sitting naked on a kitchen chair, staring at it.”

Darkly comic, Dorothy Parker’s monologue “The Telephone Call” has a woman obsess about a call to an uninterested lover: so familiar and excruciating, but it blows Bridget out of the water. Doris Lessing’s aptly named “A Man and Two Women” involves a woman drawn into a relationship between two friends: an unset t lingly voyeuristic study of married life. Most memorable, perhaps, is the mercurial love of a mother, galloping on a horse wielding a sword to save her doomed, impassive daughter in Angela Carter’s subversive “The Bloody Chamber”.

The stories cross borders of distance as well as genre and time. Yiyun Li’s “Love in die Marketplace” explores an uneasy but fierce love between mother and a forsaken daughter, each clinging to the dignity of their life, after being sidelined by their rural Chinese culture. Stylistic experimentation is not overlooked and in “The Thing Around Your Neck”, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie writes about immigrant experience in the second person, a device that lends a fresh potency where it might irritate in a novel. Surreal and symbolic, Anna Kavan’s daring story starts with a visit from “an unusually large, handsome leopard” whose appearance begins a compulsion for the unattainable.

If perfection exists in the form it comes from Alice Munro who proves herself worthy of her recent Nobel Prize. In “Miles City, Montana” and “Gravel”, Munro reveals the devastation caused by “all our natural, and particular, mistakes”.
Freya McClelland, Independent

The Story is a beautifully put together collection of 100 pieces of short fiction from masters of the genre including Angela Carter, AM Homes, Alice Munro, Flannery O’Connor, Ali Smith, Emma Donoghue, Jeanette Winterson and Katherine Mansfield. Divided into the categories Love, Loss and The Lives of Women, the volume showcases the very best writing by women, and the talent and variety on display is staggeringly impressive. From Virginia WooIf’s wonderfully wry, thought-provoking A Society, in which a group of disillusioned women agree to stop having children until they have found out what the world created by men is like, to A.M. Homes’ twisted A Real Doll, in which the young protagonist develops an intense physical relationship with a Barbie, these stories illustrate just how powerful and versatile the form can be. For fans of this sometimes overlooked genre, Christmas has come early.
Diva

 

THE STORY:

published by Head of Zeus. Buy the book here.

Digital Editions

The Story is available as an ebook, and also as three, themed collections excerpted from the book:

List of contributors

[column width=”45%” padding=”10px”]

• Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
• Margaret Atwood
• Nicola Barker
• Clare Boylan
• A.S. Byatt
• Angela Carter
• Willa Cather
• Elspeth Davie
• Carys Davies
• Anita Desai
• Emma Donoghue
• Margaret Drabble
• Stella Duffy
• Anne Enright
• Roshi Fernando
• Penelope Fitzgerald
• Mavis Gallant
• Jane Gardam
• Maggie Gee
• Ellen Gilchrist
• Nadine Gordimer
• M.J. Hyland
• Shirley Jackson
• Elizabeth Jolley
• Avril Joy
• Anna Kavan
• A.L. Kennedy
• Doris Lessing
• Yiyun Li
• Penelope Lively
• Alison Lurie
• Alison MacLeod

[/column]
[column width=”45%” padding=”10px”]

• Katherine Mansfield
• Hilary Mantel
• Lorrie Moore
• Edna O’Brien
• Flannery O’Connor
• Dorothy Parker
• Colette Paul
• Edith Pearlman
• Rachel Seiffert
• Carol Shields
• Helen Simpson
• Muriel Spark
• Elizabeth Taylor
• Alice Walker
• Marina Warner
• Lucy Wood
• Virginia Woolf
• Elizabeth Bowen
• Jennifer Egan
• Susan Hill
• A.M. Homes
• Holly Goddard Jones
• Miranda July
• Alice Munro
• Joyce Carol Oates
• Grace Paley
• Jean Rhys
• Elizabeth Russell Taylor
• Polly Samson
• Ali Smith
• Carrie Tiffany
• Jeanette Winterson

[/column]
[end_columns]