cover image Twenty Stories: A South East Arts Collection

Twenty Stories: A South East Arts Collection

. Secker & Warburg, $0 (207pp) ISBN 978-0-436-23385-2

There are no cliffhangers or comedies and no literary cataclysmsin this British import garnered from submissions to England's Southeast Regional Arts Association. Novelist/critic King has brought together stories by new writers with those of Gabriel Josipovici, Fred Urquhart, Thomas Hinde, and others known to British readers. In ""Angelfish,'' novelist Wendy Perriam portrays the rage of an obsessive model boarder when his priggish landlady's head is turned by a new, ``artistic'' lodger, one who blithely ignores her fastidious ways; Eugenie Hill contributes ``Poor Edith,'' wherein a model child commits her first act of disobedience, running away in panic at a crippled woman's approach; in ``Mrs. Llewellyn,'' newcomer Rosemary Sayers describes a woman's endeavor to die as she has livedwith unfailing seemliness. Etiquette and its violation is a curiously frequent theme in these well-mannered stories. Devoid of psychological, structural, or linguistic ingenuity, this is a workmanlike but unexciting collection. October