From Publishers Weekly
From secret agonies to improper desires and the unthinkable, this slyly titled collection touches on more than a little bit of darkness. Booker Prize–winning author Byatt (Possession) masterfully fuses fantasy with realism in several of these stories, packing a punch with her sometimes witty, sometimes horrifying examinations of faith, art and memory. In the stunning "The Thing in the Wood," two young girls, Penny and Primrose, sent to the countryside during the WWII London blitz, confront the unconscious come to life as a monster ("its expression was neither wrath nor greed, but pure misery.... It was made of rank meat, and decaying vegetation"). They return in middle age to face the Thing again, but Penny, a psychotherapist, doesn't fare as well as Primrose, a children's storyteller. A lapsed Catholic gynecologist tries to rescue a starving artist in "Body Art," enacting what Byatt casts as the very obstructiveness of the Church he left behind. It's a chilling story that shines with grace. Byatt's modern-day fairy tale, "A Stone Woman," details a woman's metamorphosis from flesh to stone, which is both terrible and redemptive ("Jagged flakes of silica and nodes of basalt pushed her breasts upward and flourished under the fall of flesh"). In "Raw Material," a creative writing teacher finds inspiration in the work of an elderly student who comes to a gruesome end, the student's life and death imitating bad art very unlike her own. The haunting final story of the collection, "The Pink Ribbon," about a man who is more troubled by remembering than by forgetting as he cares for his Alzheimer's-addled wife, turns on the appearance of the ghost of the wife's former self. With an accomplished balance of quotidian detail and eloquent flights of imagination, Byatt has crafted a powerful new collection. Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Bookmarks Magazine
Byatt’s readers fall into two camps. Some find her enthusiasm for minutiae in these Gothic tales infuriating—not everyone wants to read an extended description of the proper treatment of stoves. These detractors find this collection too smart for its own good, its many facts and metafictional digressions obstructing real emotion. Most readers, however, fell under Byatt’s spell. For all her book-learning, many agree that Byatt can spin a story that’s captivatingly scary—and perhaps more. Several praised these stories—“A Stone Woman” and “Body Art” in particular—as funny, poignant, and even uplifting. Byatt, award-winning author of Possession, may be only too willing to show off her knowledge of a variety of subjects. But for many, this knowledge only adds to her power. Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc.

From Booklist
Byatt is commanding. Her prose is crisp and astringent. Her insights are lacerating, her approach sly, her visions searing, her wit honed, and her imagination peripatetic and larcenous, feasting on art, myth, fairy tales, and science. While her novels, including the brilliant A Whistling Woman (2002) and the Booker Prize-winning Possession (1990), are complex and powerful, her short stories are dazzling concentrates. As in her earlier collections, The Matisse Stories (1995), The Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye (1997), and Elementals (1999), Byatt creates, in her newest set of gems, a palimpsest of art and life as she examines how each shapes the other, and how trauma, be it personal or the mass psychosis of war, irrevocably transforms personalities and lives. In several galvanizing and highly original tales, including "Body Art," in which a gynecologist reluctantly gets involved with an angry young artist, she postulates deeply intriguing conflicts over the sacredness and profanity of the body and the vulnerability of the mind. And once again, Byatt proves herself to be the queen of fractured fairy tales. In "The Thing in the Woods," two young girls evacuated from London at the start of World War II see something loathsome in the forest, a grotesque embodiment of evil, while "A Stone Woman" stands as a gloriously beautiful evocation of grief and metamorphosis. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Review
“A delight. . . . Byatt's stories are provoking and alarming, richly yet tautly rendered. . . .[She] has the sheer narrative skill to raise the hairs on the back of your neck and make your pulse race.” –The New York Times Book Review

“Bewitching . . . immensely readable, fiercely intelligent, and studded with astonishing, refracting images. . . . A virtuoso performance by a master storyteller.” –Los Angeles Times Book Review

“Supremely elegant. . . . Byatt peels back the surface of everyday life–and what she reveals may disturb your sleep.” –Entertainment Weekly

“Striking . . . marvelous . . . impressive. . . . Byatt’s Gothic touch transforms commonplace English settings and characters into unsettling zones of loss and fear.” –The Boston Globe

“A storyteller who could keep a sultan on the edge of his throne for a thousand and one nights.” –The New York Times Book Review

“Scrumptious . . . these are raw, tough, disruptive stories about memory, duty, madness, guilt, cruelty and loss, stories that grope and reel, that throb with secret longings, secret histories, artistic yearnings and the thrashes and groans of a stinking damnation in the underbrush.”–Miami Herald

“Her finest collection yet. . . . Bleak then surprisingly funny, very dark indeed then full of inconceivable sources of light.” –The Guardian

“Beautifully crafted. . . [Little Black Book of Stories] prods at the tender points where art, pain, and desire intersect.” –The Financial Times

“A potent alchemy of magic, horror and sensual delight.” –Elle

“Captivating . . . disturbing yet funny . . . an utterly compelling read.” –Harper’s Bazaar

“A delightful surprise. . . . A heady infusion of mythology and everyday life, with a strong undercurrent of horror. . . . Moving, thought-provoking, witty, and shocking all at once.” –The Sunday Telegraph

“Haunting . . . Astonishing . . . Vivid . . . Moving . . . [Byatt] is an athlete of the imagination, breaking barriers without apparent effort.” –The Nation

“A sophisticated and powerfully realized work. . . . A bravura performance of imaginative artistry.” –The Times Literary Supplement


From the Trade Paperback edition.

FROM OUR EDITORS

The Barnes & Noble Review
This collection by master storyteller A. S. Byatt contains five adult fairy tales that are as dark as the title implies. From two young girls' encounter with a nightmarish myth to a woman slowly turning to stone, the stories represent Byatt at her very best. "The Thing in the Forest," set during the WWII London Blitz, follows a group of young girls as they're whisked away from the devastation to the temporary safety of a countryside mansion. Amid the chaos, two girls -- Penny and Primrose -- befriend one another and, being city dwellers, decide to investigate the surrounding forest the first chance they get. But their exploration leads them to a terrifying discovery. Years afterward, they meet again at the mansion as middle-aged women to face their fear, this time with very different results. Ideologies clash in "Body Art," where a lapsed Catholic doctor has a fling and impregnates an emotionally damaged art student who has a thing for body piercings. A young woman begins a beautiful and bizarre metamorphosis when she finds her beloved mother dead in the profoundly moving "A Stone Woman," and a creative writing teacher finds inspiration in the unlikeliest of places in "Raw Material." In "The Pink Ribbon" -- a tale about commitment, remorse, and Teletubbies! -- a retired professor struggles with his wife's dementia.

Fans of classic fairy tales by Hans Christian Andersen and the Brothers Grimm -- as well as short works by contemporary storytellers like Ray Bradbury and Stephen King -- will cherish this truly magical collection, which blurs the lines between dark fantasy and reality. Paul Goat Allen

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Little Black Book of Stories offers shivers along with magical thrills. Leaves rustle underfoot in a dark wood: two middle-aged women walk into a forest, as they did when they were girls, confronting their childhood fears and memories and the strange thing they saw - or thought they saw - so long ago. A distinguished male obstetrician and a young woman artist meet in a hospital, but they have very different ideas about body parts, birth, and death. A man meets the ghost of his living wife; a woman turns to stone. And an innocent member of an evening creative writing class turns out to have her own decided views on the best way to us "raw material."

FROM THE CRITICS

Claire Messud - The New York Times

Byatt has the sheer narrative skill to raise the hairs on the back of your neck and make your pulse race. In this fine and memorable collection, she attains a near perfect balance between low and high, body and mind, the Thing and its significance.

Publishers Weekly

From secret agonies to improper desires and the unthinkable, this slyly titled collection touches on more than a little bit of darkness. Booker Prize-winning author Byatt (Possession) masterfully fuses fantasy with realism in several of these stories, packing a punch with her sometimes witty, sometimes horrifying examinations of faith, art and memory. In the stunning "The Thing in the Wood," two young girls, Penny and Primrose, sent to the countryside during the WWII London blitz, confront the unconscious come to life as a monster ("its expression was neither wrath nor greed, but pure misery.... It was made of rank meat, and decaying vegetation"). They return in middle age to face the Thing again, but Penny, a psychotherapist, doesn't fare as well as Primrose, a children's storyteller. A lapsed Catholic gynecologist tries to rescue a starving artist in "Body Art," enacting what Byatt casts as the very obstructiveness of the Church he left behind. It's a chilling story that shines with grace. Byatt's modern-day fairy tale, "A Stone Woman," details a woman's metamorphosis from flesh to stone, which is both terrible and redemptive ("Jagged flakes of silica and nodes of basalt pushed her breasts upward and flourished under the fall of flesh"). In "Raw Material," a creative writing teacher finds inspiration in the work of an elderly student who comes to a gruesome end, the student's life and death imitating bad art very unlike her own. The haunting final story of the collection, "The Pink Ribbon," about a man who is more troubled by remembering than by forgetting as he cares for his Alzheimer's-addled wife, turns on the appearance of the ghost of the wife's former self. With an accomplished balance of quotidian detail and eloquent flights of imagination, Byatt has crafted a powerful new collection. Agent, Peter Matson. (May) Forecast: Gorgeously subdued jacket art, the coy title and Byatt's name should attract considerable browser traffic; expect sales to keep pace. Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

Exiled from wartime London, two little girls think they see something monstrous in the forest, and when they meet again as middle-aged women (both slightly disdainful and slightly disappointed) they try to reconstruct the truth of their vision. A rather glum, self-righteous obstetrician, still struggling with the consequences of his lapsed Catholicism, encounters a waiflike young artist at his hospital and commences a quickie affair that lays bare just how different their values are. A novelist who hasn't amounted to much after his first success and now teaches a bargain-basement writing class encounters a much older woman who really can write. But when he goes to visit her after her first modest publishing success, he finds her horrifically murdered. Byatt demonstrates her formidable skill in this little collection of perfectly rendered pieces. The prose is arresting and memorable, the images linger, getting under your skin. But as a whole these stories are also a little cold-eyed and merciless. They are indeed "black," and some readers might even call them sour. For all literary collections, given Byatt's reputation, though this won't pull in as many readers as Possession. Barbara Hoffert, "Library Journal" Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews