The Minerva Book of Short Stories 1

by Giles Gordon (Editor), David Hughes (Editor)

paperback book

Genres: Fiction, Short Stories, Anthologies

288 pages, Paperback

First published January 10, 1990

About the author

Giles Gordon was the son of the architect Esmé Gordon. He was brought up in Edinburgh but moved to London where he worked as a literary agent. He edited Drama quarterly and was The Spectator's theatre critic. He published six novels and three collections of short stories. He also edited many collections of short stories and the Saltire Society's magazine, New Saltire.

Reviews

[Soonha]

Really enjoyed reading this anthology. Some of the stories are absolutely brilliant.

[Lucy]

Favourite quotes from the book;

Angelo's Passion - Christopher Burns
"I breakfast on the terrace. Already the sun is warm, and only the faintest of breezes stirs the newspaper. I can hear noises from the kitchen. When the heat has made the hills disappear in haze, I put on my dark glasses and hide behind them."

Fruits de Mer - Ronald Frame
"The words have to be pulled from the girl."

Lingo - Penelope Gilliat
"'In one's ignorance one somehow only thinks of East Croydon as the place where one changes. Changes trains for somewhere else.'
Alex quenched the mild reply that people lived there."

High Teas - Georgina Hammick
(My favourite of all the stories about the relationship between a troublesome old woman and a vicar)
"I have got him now, she thought, I've got him now. Confronted with this evidence, he will faint quietly away into my new delphiniums."

"Mrs Peverill didn't hear the vicar's next words. She was in a state of shock. It was not his misquoting Milton - hardly a surprise - that upset her, but the implication of his news."
...
"'I shall miss your teas,' the vicar was saying when she'd found herself a pillar and enlisted its support,..."

Good Advice is Rarer than Rubies - Salman Rushdie
"She turned to look at him, and at close range those eyes did bad things to his digestive tract."

Good Friday, 1663 - Helen Simpson
"Outside this church it is almost summer; see how the sun struggles through these coloured glass saints to fall in jewels onto my gown."

Home Place - Guy Vanderhaeghe
"The gusty roar of flames was like constant static in his ears, heat crumpled the air around him and stained it a watery yellow, greasy black clouds mounted indolently into the purity of blue skies."

[Graham]

A veritable smorgasbord of writing this, with folk I knew like Salmon Rushdie, and folk I didn’t. It was good to read “the Buddha of suburbia” one of those phrases stories that has slipped into consciousness but is hard to find the origin of: it’s by Hanif Kureishi, who also did “my beautiful laundrette”.

[Connor]

Such a mixed bag - the good ones are brilliant, but most are pants

[Michael Heap]

This book was until recently my bedtime reading. The stories average 12 pages in length (20 in all, average paperback size) so I often manage to read a whole story before switching off the light. There is a good mixture of themes and topics (largely about human relationships). Quality is variable, but I would only describe one story that was, for me, a time-waster.