The Persephone book of short stories.

London : Persephone Books, 2012.

477 pages ; 20 cm.

BEIN 2018 11210: "Published by Persephone Books Ltd 2012. Reprinted 2013 and 2014"--Half t.p. verso. Paperbound with dust jacket. Accompanied by bookmark in same pattern as endpapers.

"Endpapers taken from a roller-printed cotton twill weave manufactured in 1911 at the Arnold Print Works, North Adams, Massachusetts"--Half t.p. verso.

To celebrate having reached their one hundredth volume, here is Persephone's marvelous collection of short stories by women. They are very well chosen: some are by first-rank authors, including Katherine Mansfield, Edith Wharton, Dorothy Parker, Irène Némirovsky and Penelope Fitzgerald; others from well-known writers who have been championed by the imprint and deservedly gained fresh recognition, such as Dorothy Whipple and Mollie Panter-Downes. There are 30 stories in all, and all remarkably unhampered by their time. The first, Susan Glaspell's story of love and lexicography from 1909, seems as bold as the last, by Georgina Hammick (from 1986), though you might not have found such an unflinching description of a gynaecological procedure 103 years ago. Put-upon mothers, exasperated wives, discarded mistresses - shared tropes bind these disparate stories into a coherent whole. A stand-out is Norah Hoult's 1938 story of a wife whose husband is grateful for the money her gentleman friend pays her for sex.

English

March 23, 2017

Decorated paper.