The Oxford Book of English Short Stories , edited by A. S. Byatt, herself the au
thor of several collections of short stories, is the first anthology to specific
ally take the English short story as its theme.
The 37 stories featured here ar
e selected from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, ranging from Dickens, Tr
ollope, and Hardy to J. G. Ballard, Angela Carter, and Ian McEwan, though many d
raw ingeniously from the richness of earlier English literary writing.
