Featured New Authors
Featured Author: A. S. Byatt
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Featured Author: A. S. Byatt
With News and Reviews From the Archives of The New York Times
In This FeatureReviews of A. S. Byatt’s Earlier Books Articles About and by A. S. Byatt Recent Links
Thomas Mallon Reviews ‘On Histories and Stories: Selected Essays’ (March 18, 2001) Audio
A. S. Byatt Reads From ‘Elementals’ A. S. Byatt on the Best Story of the Millennium
Sara Krulwich/ The New York TimesA. S. Byatt
‘Shadow of a Sun‘
(1964)
“The author goes to great lengths of prolixity to define her characters, but fails to breathe life into them.”‘The Virgin in the Garden‘
(1979)
“She is at her best in bringing her characters alive, and they live on in the mind. But the book is overdecorated with tags and references from Elizabethan literature that smell of the lecture room . . .
But Byatt is essentially a fine, careful and very traditional storyteller.”‘Still Life‘
(1985)
“[Byatt] has an acute, supple mind not always primarily interested in the narrative mode as such. She excels at finely attuned brooding and an emphatic introspection . . .”‘Sugar: And Other Stories‘
(1987)
“The tone of the collection suggests a powerful late-Victorian intellect trained on 20th-century social and personal dilemmas. That peculiar stance gives some stories a fine timelessness and freedom; in
a few cases it makes for too-tight control.”‘Possession‘
(1990)
“As ‘Possession’ progresses, it seems less and less like the usual satire about academia and more like something by Jorge Luis Borges. . . . a tour de force that opens every narrative device of
English fiction to inspection without, for a moment, ceasing to delight.”‘Passions of the Mind‘
(1992)
“‘Passions of the Mind,’ a collection of erudite essays on literature, many previously published, will delight the very literary and intimidate everyone else.”‘The Matisse Stories‘
(1995)
“For all their thematic elaboration, Ms. Byatt’s stories do not feel contrived or didactic. On the contrary, her characters are credible, their encounters authentically complex, their environments vividly
delineated.”‘Babel Tower‘
(1996)
“. . . shows her usual impressive command of slippery ideas and the solidest of details, which sit less earnestly than ever on her pages; they mix and move with new energy, even abandon. Ms. Byatt, a relentlessly
talky novelist, has met a good match in the larger-than-life 60’s.”‘Imagining Characters‘ (with Ignes Sodre. Edited by Rebecca Swift.)
(1997)
“. . . may have been doomed from its birth in the mind of its editor, Rebecca Swift. The book is a series of dialogues, a form that easily lends itself to rambling . . .”‘The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye: Five Fairy Stories‘
(1997)
“A. S. Byatt is a storyteller who could keep a sultan on the edge of his throne for a thousand and one nights.”‘Elementals: Stories of Fire and Ice‘
(1999)
“[T]he throwaway gleams of a writer at the height of her powers. Byatt’s prose is capacious yet exquisite, and it is proof of her ample gifts that she can rivet us with what, from a less unified talent,
might feel like a travelogue, a restaurant review or art criticism.”
Audio: A. S. Byatt Reads From ‘Elementals’
Book Excerpt: ‘Crocodile Tears,’ from ‘Elementals’
‘The Biographer’s Tale‘
(2001)
“Lovely untidiness . . . Byatt uses the morass to comic and dramatic effect but far too extensively . . . The author has launched this endearing character on a frail skiff, then swamped it with supplies.”
First Chapter: ‘The Biographer’s Tale’
Byatt Wins the Booker Prize
(1990)
Byatt’s “Possession” won Britain’s most prestigious literary award, the Booker Prize, which helped establish her reputation in America.Best Seller Breaks Rule On Crossing The Atlantic
(1991)
Asked to explain why, “Possession” a novel about English scholars and 19th-century English Victorian poets, had landed on the American bestseller list, Byatt suggests in an interview that “It’s
like the books people used to enjoy reading when they enjoyed reading.”What Possessed A.S. Byatt?
(1991)
“I am not an academic who happens to have written a novel. I am a novelist who happens to be quite good academically,” says Byatt in this New York Times Magazine profile written after the success of
“Possession.”The Sin of Families and Nations by A. S. Byatt
(1993)
As part of a series of essays by writers about the deadly sins, Byatt surveys literary portrayals of envy from the Bible to Nietzsche.A. S. Byatt Reviews Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s ‘Of Love and Other Demons’
(1995)
“The world is the familiar Garcia Marquez world, a mixture of phantasmagoria and a realism whose truths seem as incredible and strange as the moments of demonic magic. . . . almost didactic, yet brilliantly
moving, [a] tour de force.”Narrate Or Die by A. S. Byatt
(1999)
Byatt argues that “The Thousand and One Nights” is the best story collection of the millennium.
Audio: A. S. Byatt on the Best Story of the Millennium
Of the Making of Many Lists: A Web-only Essay by A. S. Byatt
(1999)
In an essay about being one of the panel that helped select the Modern Library’s choices for best books of the century, Byatt writes, “I enjoy lists. They are a part of the way the human brain works,
like floor-plans, and route-maps, like perhaps Euclidean figures. With lists we arrange both the past and the future in our minds.”
Related SiteA. S. Byatt Home Page
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