Collected Stories – Barbara Anderson

Description

Title: Collected Stories
Author: Barbara Anderson (1926–2013)
Publisher: Victoria University Press, Wellington, 2005
Format: Paperback
Condition: Very good — corner bump and partial cover wear to top right; slight discolouration to pages

Out of print. NZ #1 Bestseller.

Description:

Barbara Anderson published her first book of short stories at 63, after thirty years teaching science and working in laboratories. I think we should go into the jungle (1989) was an immediate NZ bestseller. It reprinted twice, crossed to the UK and Commonwealth, and prompted Nick Hornby to write, in the Times Literary Supplement: “Barbara Anderson is a born writer.”

This Collected Stories gathers everything — all the fiction from I think we should go into the jungle and her second collection The Peacocks (1999), four stories from her UK collection Glorious Things not previously available in NZ book form, and two new stories published here for the first time. Settings move across mid-twentieth-century Hawkes Bay farms, school common rooms, beach holidays, pharmacies, and suburban Wellington living rooms. The world Anderson writes is recognisably, specifically New Zealand — but the quality of attention she brings to it is the quality that prompted Penelope Fitzgerald to write in the TLS: “She is a novelist of great talent, well qualified to write black comedy. But she has, too, the comprehension of human incomprehension, the pity for human pity, that makes it possible to write tragedy.”

Her prose is compressed and exact. The dialogue is pitch-perfect. The emotional content arrives sideways, in what isn’t said between people who have been living alongside each other for decades. Michael Hulse in Guardian Weekly called her debut “one of the sharpest collections in English since Carver’s Cathedral in 1984.” Ian Reid in the Listener compared her to Flaubert, Patrick White, and Grace Paley. Dirk Bogarde called her “a quite irresistible writer with a microscopic eye for telltale detail.” He wasn’t wrong.

Barbara Anderson died in Auckland in March 2013, aged 86. This collected edition, a NZ #1 bestseller when it appeared in 2005, is the fullest single-volume account of her short fiction.

Why We Stock It:

Anderson wrote the interior lives of NZ women across the middle of the twentieth century with a precision and wit that no one else has matched. Her subject is the social fabric: who holds it together, how they manage it, and what it costs them. The Gravy was made to keep this kind of work in circulation.