 Cover of UK paperback edition | |
| Author | William Boyd |
|---|---|
| Publisher | Bloomsbury Publishing |
Publication date | 1 March 2008 |
| Pages | 355 |
| ISBN | 9780747592297 |
The Dream Lover: Short Stories is a collection of short stories by the Scottish writer William Boyd that were written at the start of Boyd's career. [1] It was published in 2008 by Bloomsbury. The Dream Lover combines two previous books of short stories: On the Yankee Station and The Destiny of Nathalie 'X' . [2]
Writing in the Financial Times , Jerome de Groote said that Boyd's book "demonstrates both the broad range of his imagination and the development of his taut prose style". [3]
In a review for The Observer , Vanessa Thorpe said: "Boyd believes the short form has been key to his evolution as a writer. He says in his introduction to this selection, drawn from across his career, that these brief escapades have allowed him to vary his style and technique... Passive or accidental observers, [including] the title story of the collection, 'Dream Lover', are crucial to what Boyd does. It is the simple, heartfelt stories which are the most vivid. All of them though, even the ones that crawl inside the heads of some quite creepy folk, such as 'My Girl in Skin-Tight Jeans' or 'Not Yet, Jayette', are compelling". [4]
Laurence Phelan, reviewing the book for The Independent on Sunday , said: "If there can be said to be a common thread, it's nothing more than the infinite vagaries of the human heart and the complexities of the mind... All that links them is their erudition, refined prose-style and precisely honed form". [1]
John Hoyer Updike was an American novelist, poet, short-story writer, art critic, and literary critic. One of only four writers to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction more than once, Updike published more than twenty novels, more than a dozen short-story collections, as well as poetry, art and literary criticism and children's books during his career.
Paul Laurence Dunbar was an American poet, novelist, and short story writer of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Born in Dayton, Ohio, to parents who had been enslaved in Kentucky before the American Civil War, Dunbar began writing stories and verse when he was a child. He published his first poems at the age of 16 in a Dayton newspaper, and served as president of his high school's literary society.
A short story is a piece of prose fiction that typically can be read in one sitting and focuses on a self-contained incident or series of linked incidents, with the intent of evoking a single effect or mood. The short story is one of the oldest types of literature and has existed in the form of legends, mythic tales, folk tales, fairy tales, tall tales, fables and anecdotes in various ancient communities around the world. The modern short story developed in the early 19th century.
Laurence Housman was an English playwright, writer and illustrator during the Victorian era. He studied art in London. He was a younger brother of the poet A. E. Housman.
Drexel Jerome Lewis Bixby was an American short story writer and scriptwriter. He wrote the 1953 story "It's a Good Life" which was the basis for a 1961 episode of The Twilight Zone and which was included in Twilight Zone: The Movie (1983). He also wrote four episodes for the Star Trek series: "Mirror, Mirror", "Day of the Dove", "Requiem for Methuselah", and "By Any Other Name". With Otto Klement, he co-wrote the story upon which the science fiction movie Fantastic Voyage (1966), television series, and novel by Isaac Asimov were based. Bixby's final produced or published work so far was the screenplay for the 2007 science fiction film The Man from Earth.
William Warner Sleator III, known as William Sleator, was an American science fiction author who wrote primarily young adult novels but also wrote for younger readers. His books typically deal with adolescents coming across a peculiar phenomenon related to an element of theoretical science, then trying to deal with the situation. The theme of family relationships, especially between siblings, is frequently intertwined with the science fiction plotline.
Michael Frayn, FRSL is an English playwright and novelist. He is best known as the author of the farce Noises Off and the dramas Copenhagen and Democracy. His novels, such as Towards the End of the Morning, Headlong and Spies, have also been critical and commercial successes, making him one of the handful of writers in the English language to succeed in both drama and prose fiction. He has also written philosophical works, such as The Human Touch: Our Part in the Creation of the Universe (2006).
William Andrew Murray Boyd is a Scottish novelist, short story writer and screenwriter.
Katharine Elizabeth Whitehorn was a British journalist, columnist, author and radio presenter. She was the first woman to have a column in The Observer, which ran from 1963 to 1996 and from 2011 to 2017. She was the first female rector of a university in Scotland. Her books include Cooking in a Bedsitter (1961).
Junot Díaz is a Dominican-American writer, creative writing professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and was fiction editor at Boston Review. He also serves on the board of advisers for Freedom University, a volunteer organization in Georgia that provides post-secondary instruction to undocumented immigrants. Central to Díaz's work is the immigrant experience, particularly the Latino immigrant experience.
Any Human Heart: The Intimate Journals of Logan Mountstuart is a 2002 novel by William Boyd, a British writer. It is written as a lifelong series of journals kept by the fictional character Mountstuart, a writer whose life (1906–1991) spanned the defining episodes of the 20th century, crossed several continents and included a convoluted sequence of relationships and literary endeavours. Boyd uses the diary form to explore how public events impinge on individual consciousness, so that Mountstuart's journal alludes almost casually to the war, the death of a prime minister or the abdication of the king. Boyd plays ironically on the theme of literary celebrity, introducing his protagonist to several real writers who are included as characters.
Adam Dant is a Jerwood Drawing Prize-winning British artist (2002).
Aminatta Forna, OBE, is a Scottish and Sierra Leonean writer. She is the author of a memoir, The Devil That Danced on the Water: A Daughter's Quest, and four novels: Ancestor Stones (2006), The Memory of Love (2010), The Hired Man (2013) and Happiness (2018). Her novel The Memory of Love was awarded the Commonwealth Writers' Prize for "Best Book" in 2011, and was also shortlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction. Forna is Professor of Creative Writing at Bath Spa University and was, until recently, Sterling Brown Distinguished Visiting Professor at Williams College in Massachusetts. She is currently Director and Lannan Foundation Chair of Poetics of the Lannan Center for Poetics and Social Practice at Georgetown University.
Maria Joan Hyland is an ex-lawyer and the author of three novels: How the Light Gets In (2004), Carry Me Down (2006) and This is How (2009). Hyland is a lecturer in creative writing in the Centre for New Writing at the University of Manchester. Carry Me Down (2006) was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and won the Hawthornden Prize and the Encore Prize.
The Destiny of Nathalie 'X' is the second short story collection by William Boyd, published in 1995, some fourteen years after his first collection, On the Yankee Station.
Longing is a 2013 play by the Scottish writer William Boyd, based on the short stories My Life and "A Visit to Friends" by the Russian author Anton Chekhov. Its premiere production ran at the Hampstead Theatre in London from 28 February to 6 April 2013, directed by Nina Raine and starring Tamsin Greig, Iain Glen, John Sessions, Jonathan Bailey, Natasha Little, Eve Ponsonby and Catrin Stewart. Boyd, who was theatre critic for the University of Glasgow in the 1970s and has many actor friends, refers to his ambition to write a play as finally getting "this monkey off my back".
The Way the World Works is a 2012 book by Nicholson Baker that collects thirty-four previously published essays together. These essays were originally published in a variety of publications, including The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, and The New Yorker.
Fascination is a collection of short stories by the Scottish writer William Boyd. It was published in the United Kingdom in 2004 by Hamish Hamilton and in the United States in 2005 by Knopf Books.
The Dreams of Bethany Mellmoth is a collection of short stories by the Scottish writer William Boyd. It was published in 2017 by Viking Press. Penguin Books released an unabridged audiobook version, also in 2017.
Bamboo is a collection of non-fiction works by the Scottish writer William Boyd. It was published in the United Kingdom in 2005 by Hamish Hamilton. In the United States, a paperback version was published by Bloomsbury USA in 2007 as Bamboo: Essays and Criticism.