A.S. Byatt

One of England's foremost writers, A. S. Byatt was educated at York and at Newnham College, Cambridge. She taught at the Central School of Art and Design and was Senior Lecturer in English and American Literature at University College, London, before returning to full-time writing in 1983. A distinguished critic as well as a novelist, she was appointed a C.B.E. in 1990. Her novel Possession won the Booker Prize and Irish Times/Aer Lingus International Fiction Prize in 1990. [Read more]

Sugar and Other Stories
Vintage International, 1992 (PhP 100.00)
It should come as no surprise that short stories by the author of the magical "Possession" are populated by erudite paranoiacs, witches, changelings, and the ghost of a dead child. But these otherworldly beings move through landscapes that are as recognizable as a London square and as tangible as the well-furnished drawing room of an English country house. A. S. Byatt's short fictions, collected in paperback for the first time, explore the fragile ties between generations, the dizzying abyss of loss and the elaborate memories we construct against it, resulting in a book that compels us to inhabit other lives and returns us to our own with new knowledge, compassion, and a sense of wonder.

The Matisse Stories
Vintage International, 1996 (PhP 100.00)
These three stories by the flamboyantly gifted author of "Possession" celebrate the eye even as they reveal its unexpected proximity to the heart. For if each of A.s. Byatt's narratives is in some way inspired by a painting of Henri Matisse, each is also about the intimate connection between seeing and feeling--about the ways in which a glance we meant to be casual may suddenly call forth the deepest reserves of our being. A neglected wife watching her reflection in the gleaming surfaces of a trendy beauty parlor; a housekeeper whose passion for knitting may not be as naive as her employers think it is; two academics weighing a young girl's future over the eqxquisite palette of a Chinese lunch--as executed by Byatt, these tableaux come to life, exposing the unruliness of grief, desire, and creativity. Beautifully written, intensely observed, "The Matisse Stories" is fiction of spell-binding authority.