(publ. Jonathan Cape)
In Between the Sheets (1978) is the second collection of short stories by British writer Ian McEwan.
In Between the Sheets (1978) is the second collection of short stories by British writer Ian McEwan.
The collection is McEwan's second book and second collection of short stories, and was regarded by the author (along with his first collection, First Love, Last Rites ) as an opportunity to experiment and find his voice as a writer. In an interview with Christopher Ricks in 1979, McEwan commented, "They were a kind of laboratory for me. They allowed me to try out different things, to discover myself as a writer."
Some critics acclaimed In Between the Sheets while others did not. [1] In The Times , Caroline Moorehead asked in her headline, "Who Else But Ian McEwan Would Put a Lover in Ape's Clothing?" [2] In The New York Review of Books , Robert Towers praised McEwan's "quiet, precise, sensual touch," calling him "a writer in full control of his materials" and describing his England as a "flat, rubble-strewn wasteland, populated by freaks and monsters, most of them articulate enough to tell their own stories with mesmerizing narrative power and an unfaltering instinct for the perfect, sickening detail." [3] In the Washington Post , Terence March described McEwan's prose as "clear as a windowpane," and ranked the author as "a gifted storyteller and possibly the best British writer to appear in a decade or more." [4] Hermione Lee of New Statesman referred to the stories as “seven elegantly gruesome accounts of derelict and perverted lives [that] cannot be dismissed after the first frisson: their peculiar images of pain and loss seem, retrospectively, to grow in depth.” [1]
A year later, again in The New York Review of Books, writer and critic V.S. Pritchett gave a good sense of the stories' impact: "Ian McEwan has been recognized as an arresting new talent in the youngest generation of English short story writers. His subject matter is often squalid and sickening; his imagination has a painful preoccupation with the adolescent secrets of sexual aberration and fantasy. But in his accomplishment as a story writer he is an immediate master of styles and structures, his writing transfigures, and he can command variety in subject and feeling. His intellectual resources enable him—and the reader—to open windows in a claustrophobia which otherwise would have left us flinching and no more. Invention, irony, humor, a gift for satirical parody and curiosity give him the artist’s initiative. We do recognize an underworld—for that is what it is—and it is natural that he has evoked an, albeit distant, connection with Beckett and Kafka. His limitation is that his range of felt experience is confined to his love of his disgusts." [5]
A reviewer for Kirkus Reviews criticized "Pornography" as predictable, but praised the title story, "Reflections of a Kept Ape", and "Dead as They Come", referring to the last of the three as "not the first story about a man in love with a mannequin, but surely both the funniest and ugliest". The reviewer wrote that "this slim collection is hardly McEwan at his best (he remains a writer of tremendous style who seems limited by his obsessions), but at the very least it reinforces his position as the Roald DaM for the sexually-eruptive 1970s.” [6]
Julian Moynahan of The New York Times wrote an unfavorable review. Moynahan praised "To and Fro" as an "elegant stylistic exercise", but panned the title story, arguing "The see-saw relation between life and art that is implied goes back to Pater, Wilde, Mann, Yeats and a host of other writers active at the turn of the century. Nobody minds if a writer uses a stale and questionable idea, just so long as it combines with genuine feeling and insight. No such combining goes on here." Moynahan stated that "the stories are really not very good. They are mostly one-finger exercises containing a few passages of striking writing”. [7] In The Times Literary Supplement , Caroline Blackwood argued that McEwan's "descriptions of desolate urban landscapes are very vivid. He can create a memorable atmosphere of menace. But he disgusts at a cost, for his determination to shock can make his dialogue absurdly tortured and the stories too contrived.” [8]
David Malcolm, however, argued in 2002 that most of the stories are "rather detailed and painstaking evocations of mood and feeling" along with those in the author's earlier collection First Love, Last Rites (1975). [9] Lucas Wittmann of The Daily Beast listed the collection in 2010 as one of McEwan's strongest early works along with his other short story collection, arguing, "In all of these stories lie the essence of McEwan’s fictional vision, and for any fan of his work this is the place to start to understand how he has evolved as a writer even while he’s never quite given up on finding humanity and dark humor in our collective foibles." [10]
Ian Russell McEwan is a British novelist and screenwriter. In 2008, The Times featured him on its list of "The 50 greatest British writers since 1945" and The Daily Telegraph ranked him number 19 in its list of the "100 most powerful people in British culture".
The Children Act is a novel by the English writer Ian McEwan. It was published on 2 September 2014. The title is a reference to the Children Act 1989, a UK Act of Parliament. The book has been compared to Charles Dickens's Bleak House, with its similar settings, and opening lines.
Sir Victor Sawdon Pritchett was a British writer and literary critic.
Amsterdam is a 1998 novel by British writer Ian McEwan, for which he was awarded the 1998 Booker Prize.
The Cement Garden is a 1978 novel by Ian McEwan. It was adapted into a 1993 film of the same name by Andrew Birkin, starring Charlotte Gainsbourg and Andrew Robertson. The Cement Garden has had a positive reception since its original publication.
First Love, Last Rites is a collection of short stories by Ian McEwan. It was first published in 1975 by Jonathan Cape, with cover designed by Bill Botten, and re-issued in 1997 by Vintage.
Atonement is a 2001 British metafictional novel written by Ian McEwan. Set in three time periods, 1935 England, Second World War England and France, and present-day England, it covers an upper-class girl's half-innocent mistake that ruins lives, her adulthood in the shadow of that mistake, and a reflection on the nature of writing.
Robert Ian Hamilton was a British literary critic, reviewer, biographer, poet, magazine editor and publisher.
Black Dogs is a 1992 novel by the British author Ian McEwan. It concerns the aftermath of the Nazi era in Europe, and how the fall of the Berlin Wall in the late 1980s affected those who once saw Communism as a way forward for society. The main characters travel to France, where they encounter disturbing residues of Nazism still at large in the French countryside. Critical reception was polarized.
The Child in Time (1987) is a novel by Ian McEwan. The story concerns Stephen, an author of children's books, and his wife, two years after the kidnapping of their three-year-old daughter Kate.
The Innocent is a 1990 novel by British writer Ian McEwan. It received positive reviews from book critics and is considered by some to be one of his best novels.
The Comfort of Strangers is a 1981 novel by British writer Ian McEwan. It is his second novel, and is set in an unnamed city. Harold Pinter adapted it as a screenplay for a film directed by Paul Schrader in 1990, which starred Rupert Everett, Christopher Walken, Helen Mirren and Natasha Richardson. The film is set in Venice.
Ewan Morrison is a Scottish author, cultural critic, director, and screenwriter. He has published eight novels and a collection of short stories, as of 2021. His novel Nina X won the Saltire Society Literary Award for Fiction Book of the Year 2019. Literary critic Stuart Kelly described Morrison as "the most fluent and intelligent writer of his generation here in Scotland".
The Daydreamer is a 1994 children's novel by British author Ian McEwan. Illustrated by Anthony Browne. The novel was first published by Jonathan Cape. It draws its plot directly from the Rankin/Bass movie, The Daydreamer (1966) in which a young boy daydreams and enters a world of Hans Christian Andersen stories. It is considered to be McEwan's first book for children, or second if taking into account the picture book Rose Blanche (1985). Critics praised McEwan's imagination, but noted that the book had high "sweetness-and-light levels".
Sweet Tooth is a novel by the English writer Ian McEwan, published on 21 August 2012. It deals with the experiences of its protagonist, Serena Frome, during the early 1970s. After graduating from Cambridge she is recruited by MI5, and becomes involved in a covert programme to combat communism by infiltrating the intellectual world. When she becomes romantically involved with her mark, complications ensue.
"Jack Flea's Birthday Celebration" is the fourth episode of the sixth series of the BBC television series Second City Firsts written by Ian McEwan and directed by Mike Newell. The episode was recorded by the BBC at Pebble Mill and broadcast on 10 April 1976. McEwan wrote the play in 1974, just after completing his first book, First Love, Last Rites, a collection of short stories and he regards it as belonging to that collection.
Nutshell is the 14th novel by English author and screenwriter Ian McEwan published in 2016. It alludes to William Shakespeare’s Hamlet and re-imagines the plot from the perspective of an eight-month-old unborn foetus in London in 2015.
First Love, Last Rites is a 1997 American romantic drama film directed by Jesse Peretz and starring Natasha Gregson Wagner and Giovanni Ribisi. It is based on the short story of the same name by Ian McEwan and centers on the passionate love affair between a young couple over one Louisiana summer.
Machines Like Me is the 15th novel by the English author Ian McEwan. The novel was published in 2019 by Jonathan Cape.
Julian Lane Moynahan was an American academic, librarian, literary critic, poet, and novelist. Much of Moynahan's academic work was focussed on D. H. Lawrence and Vladimir Nabokov. He was active as a book reviewer for leading publications on both sides of the Atlantic and was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1983.
