The Complete Stories of Mary Butts

As John Ashbery writes in his preface to this comprehensive volume of short fiction by British modernist Butts, known for her elliptical dialogue, quick-cutting scenes, and deviant characters: "One keeps getting the feeling that these stories were written yesterday." The three collections (1923's Speed the Plough, 1932's Several Occasions, and 1938's Last Stories), as well as some uncollected stories being published for the first time, gathered here exemplify the way Butts brought her keenly prescient style and perspective to the great themes of her time and class: upper-crust types who take on moral charity cases, dinner parties gone awry, vague breaches of etiquette, women's burgeoning sensuality and power, and the paranormal. Some of Butts's most accessible stories are charming, straightforward country-house murder mysteries ("In Bloomsbury") and atmospheric ghost tales ("Look Homeward, Angel"; "With and Without Buttons"), but her cast of wealthy and down-and-out Londoners, Parisians, and Americans entertain as they navigate intricate domestic and social concerns, too. Relationships and even lives hang in the balance over, for instance, an abrupt knock at the door ("The House Party," dedicated to Jean Cocteau) or the botched delivery of an invitation to cocktails ("The Warning"). Throughout, Butts draws the eye to details both grimy and glittering%E2%80%94city streets that "gleamed like stale fish," a woman's reflection "like a child that has been dipped in dew." And then there are her indelible descriptions of Paris, where, as she writes in "The Master's Last Dancing," which ran in The New Yorker in 1998, "everything happens." This hefty volume substantiates Butts as an essential observer of fetes and failures who merits reading alongside her better-known contemporaries. (Dec.)