 First edition | |
| Author | Graham Swift |
|---|---|
| Cover artist | 'Beachy Head' by Eric Ravilious |
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Language | English |
| Publisher | Simon & Schuster |
Publication date | 2014 |
| Media type | |
| Pages | 288 |
| ISBN | 1-47113-739-2 |
England and Other Stories is a 2014 collection of 25 short stories by the author Graham Swift.
Swift said in The Guardian :
All these stories are bits of England but they are bits of different Englands. England now is such a heterogenous, indefinable place. I like the title England and Other Stories because what a lot of people think of as England may be just a story now. I myself am obviously unequivocally and indigenously English, I was born in England and I'm very attached to my country. But I think as a writer all the time I'm approaching it as though it might be a strange place." [1]
Erica Wagner from the New Statesman writes "There is something irrevocable about all of us being here, this book reminds us. Wherever we come from, here we are: it is our actions and the way we tell our stories that will define us. If David Cameron wishes to consider further the notion of British values, he could do worse than turn to Swift’s compact, thought-provoking tales. They offer the complex enlightenment that only good fiction can provide." [2]
In The Observer , Lucy Scholes concludes "As a collection, these initially disparate-seeming stories come together to build a coherent and cohesive whole; whether the same can be said for the lives depicted, Swift seems less sure. "What a terrible thing it can be just to be on this Earth," thinks a lonely widower who discovers a dead body on a solitary country walk. "First on the scene" for the only time in his life – but having dialled the emergency services, he's lost for words." [3]
Valerie Martin explains in The New York Times : "There's something bright and rewarding about this tendency to consider both the connotation and the denotation of words as they appear in random thoughts. And it is this that I take, though it isn't on my list, to be a prime signifier of Englishness. Shakespeare's characters engaged in it, and here they are still, in Swift's stories: rich and poor, soldiers, sailors, barbers, lawyers, doctors, all given to following a casual word to its source. This rich, lively collection reminds me of what my grandfather didn't want his son ever to forget: an English education." [4]
Matthew Dennison in The Spectator starts his review with "A calculated ordinariness unites the protagonists in Graham Swift’s new collection of short stories. In each of these mini fictions, as in his novels, Swift revisits his conceit of the narrator as man (or woman) on the Clapham omnibus. Invariably he endows these blank ciphers with aspects of the extraordinary — percipience, insight or understanding — or exposes them to feelings and events which place them in extraordinary positions and offer them opportunities to behave remarkably while remaining apparently run of the mill. Swift revels in the trappings of Pooterishness while denying his protagonists Mr Pooter’s silliness. His vision may be contrived but it never patronises. The experience of these stories rescues Swift’s ‘ordinary’ men and women from stereotype, a moral in itself." [5]
M John Harrison in The Guardian writes "This is a sharp, beautiful collection: every story quick and readable but leaving in the memory a core, a residue, of thoughtfulness. Some are wicked, some are funny; others, such as "Was She the Only One" or "Fusilli", encapsulate a huge but numbly personal crisis; some manage all three at once. Some feel old-fashioned, but as if more than one layer of time is involved – as if you're reading a 1950s story mimicked in a pastiche of a TV drama from the 1970s. There are a few duds, but Swift's practice – which is to make a world in a dozen pages, sometimes less; a world in a bottle – carries the reader quickly through and on to the next. His touch is so light and craftsmanlike, his scene shifts so subtle, his emotional logic so incontrovertible, that sometimes we hardly notice where they have taken us until too late". [6]
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