Winter's Tales (Winter's Tales New Series) - Hardcover

The seventh edition of this annual anthology--from Britain but with an international bent--features, often enough, refined mandarin prose and multilayered narratives that offer a marked contrast to American minimalism. With one exception, the fictions are original: the solicitation process is unclear, but the writers range from established (Clare Colvin, Laura Kalpakian, Piers Paul Read, Tom Wakefield) to emerging (Balraj Khanna, Tony Peake, Patrick Roscoe). Read's ``Family Christmas'' is a delicate slice-of-life about a wife who returns with her family, including her stiff husband (``just another irritable paterfamilias''), to her recently widowed mother's house. Colvin's ``The Archduke's Dwarf'' makes delightful use of historical and fairy-tale elements to meditate on the nature of love. In tragicomic fashion, Khanna, a transposed Indian, dramatizes (in ``The Last Card Game'') the domestic warfare between a husband who longs for the ``good old days in the Punjab'' and a wife whose maternal feelings have been displaced onto a terrier. Helen Harris's deft ``The Mirage'' is a sad tale about a woman who ``married modestly'' for ``a straight exchange,'' not love, before quarreling with her unloved husband and eventually drifting into loneliness. Scottish writer Alison Fell's ``Queen Christina and the Windsurfer'' is a lyrically playful encounter between goddesses and mortals, whereas ``Carpe Diem'' by Isidoro Blaisten (from Buenos Aires) is a clever anthology-ending bit of wordplay that punctuates this edition's commitment to the eclecticism of various keys both major and minor. While the overall quality of the 12 stories is mixed, the cosmopolitan tone and varied forms are satisfying. -- Copyright ©1991, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Diverse geographical and emotional terrains are explored in this latest rewarding and provocative installment of the well-known annual anthology of stories. In Patrick McGrath's "The Other Psychiatrist," a devasting satire on the psychoanalytic profession, a suicidal patient's precarious condition takes a back seat to the acrimonious rivalry between two shrinks at an upstate New York mental home. Balraj Khanna's "The Last Card Game" features an unhappily married Punjabi transplanted to London who uses the promises of his shrewish, continental wife's sexual favors as a bargaining chip in a wild card game. Interior monologue enlivens Laura Kalpakian's witty portrayal of an American arts administrator in Italy, a specialist in Renaissance angels whose complex love life is anything but heavenly ("Change at Empoli"). Marriage is on the rocks in Helen Harris's "The Mirage," about a hilariously mismatched childless couple, and in Tony Peake's "Necessary Appendages," in which a newlywed wife tries to accommodate her husband's homosexual yearnings. Two or three of the 12 stories misfire, but these are more than compensated for by the successes here.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.