The Penguin Book of Modern British Short Stories

Malcolm Bradbury

Penguin Adult, Feb 25, 1988 - Fiction - 448 pages

This anthology is in many ways a 'best of the best', containing gems from thirty-four of Britain's outstanding contemporary writers. It is a book to dip into, to read from cover to cover, to lend to friends and read again. It includes stories of love and crime, stories touched with comedy and the supernatural, stories set in London, Los Angeles, Bucharest and Tokyo. Above all, as you will discover, it satisfies Samuel Butler's anarchic pleasure principle: 'I should like to like Schumann's music better than I do; I daresay I could make myself like it better if I tried; but I do not like having to try to make myself like things; I like things that make me like them at once and no trying at all...'

What people are saying

LibraryThing Review

User Review  - mooingzelda - LibraryThing

I started reading this in September 2018. I read a few stories at the time, then put it down and read the odd one in between other books, then forgot about it entirely until picking it up again a few ...

Review: The Penguin Book of Modern British Short Stories

User Review  - Laura - Goodreads

Although some of the stories in this collection are tiring and weird, most are enjoyable and interesting to read with some providing great comedy.

About the author

Malcolm Bradbury is a novelist, critic, television dramatist and Emeritus Professor of American Studies at the University of East Anglia. He is author of the novels Eating People is Wrong (1959); Stepping Westward (1965); The History Man (1975); which won the Royal Society of Literature Heinemann Prize and was adapted as a famous television series; Rates of Exchange (1983) which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize; Cuts: A Very Short Novel (1987), also televised; and Doctor Criminale (1992). His critical works include The Modern American Novel (1984; revised edition, 1992); No, Not Bloomsbury (essays, 1987); The Modern world: Ten Great Writers (1988); From Puritanism to Post-modernism: A History of American Literature (with Richard Ruland, 1991) He is the author of a collection of seven stories and nine parodies, entitled Who Do You Think You Are? (1976), and of several works of humour and satire, including Why Come to Slaka? (1986), Unsent Letters (1988; revised edition, 1995) and Mensonge (1987). Many of his books are published by Penguin. In addition, he has written many television plays and the television 'novel' The Gravy Train and The Gravy Train Goes East. He has adapted several television series, including Tom Sharpe's Porterhouse Blue, Kinglsey Amis's The Green Man and Stella Gibbon's' Cold Comfort Farm, now a feature film.

Malcolm Bradbury lives in Norwich, travels good deal, and in 1991 he was awarded the CBE.

Bibliographic information

• Title: The Penguin Book of Modern British Short Stories; Volume 6306 of Penguin books; Penguin: Fiction
• Editor: Malcolm Bradbury
• Contributor: Malcolm Bradbury
• Edition: illustrated, reprint
• Publisher: Penguin Adult, 1988
• ISBN: 0140063064, 9780140063066
• Length: 448 pages
• Subjects: Fiction / Anthologies (multiple authors); Fiction / General; Fiction / Literary; Fiction / Short Stories (single author); Literary Collections / European / English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh; Literary Collections / General