Newspaper Article

V.S. Pritchett: Teller of tales The short fiction of England's lyric poet of the repressed

Reviewed by David R. Slavitt, A poet, novelist and translator whose first collection of short fiction, "Short Stories Are Not Real Life," will appear this fall

1991

Overview

Complete Collected Short Stories By V.S. Pritchett Random House, 1,220 pages, $35 One might raise an eyebrow about the repetitive, even obsessive publication by Random House of the short fiction of V. S. Pritchett. There was a \"Collected Stories\" (1956), another \"Collected Stories\" (1982), then a \"More Collected Stories\" and \"The Complete Short Stories,\" all of which preceded this \"Complete Collected Stories\"-which is not, despite its awkward name, \"complete,\" lacking as it does the pieces from Pritchett's first collection, \"The Spanish Virgin\" (1930). At least 21 other uncollected stories also are absent. Yet Pritchett deserves whatever push a publisher's pride or greed can supply. As old as the century, he has been writing extraordinarily fine stories and criticism for longer than most of us can remember and is one of those writers who, like Nabokov or Auden or Graham Greene, always shows up on lists of people who ought to have had the Nobel Prize. But if Pritchett is taken for granted, if the fact that he was knighted 15 years ago tends to make him official and assigned, the kind of writer one wouldn't read for fun, it is exactly fun, irreverence, honesty and humor that he has been offering so well and for so long. This grand and rich volume is therefore welcome because it calls attention again to one of the great achievements of short-story writing in English.

• Publisher: Tribune Publishing Company, LLC