A. S. Byatt's Oxford Book of English Short Stories is a celebration of the richness of English short-story writing. The thirty-seven stories featured here are selected from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, ranging from Dickens, Trollope, and Hardy, to J. G. Ballard, Angela Carter, and Ian McEwan. A. S. Byatt explains: 'My only criterion was that those stories I selected should be startling and satisfying, and if possible make the hairs on the neck prickle with excitement, aesthetic or narrative.'