Here is a treat for John Irving addicts and a perfect introduction to his work for the uninitiated. In his spirited opening piece, Irving explains how he became a writer:

'A fiction writer's memory is an especially imperfect provider of detail; we can always imagine a better detail than the one we can remember. The correct detail is rarely exactly what happened; the most truthful detail is what could have happened, or what should have...Being a writer is a strenuous marriage between careful observation and just as carefully imagining the truths you haven't had the opportunity to see. The rest is the necessary strict toiling with the language...'

'With that in mind I think that I have become a writer because of my grandmother's good manners and - more specifically - because of a retarded garbage collector to whom my grandmother was always polite and kind.'

There follows six scintillating stories written over the past twenty years, including The Pension Grillparzer, previously only to be found inside The World According To Garp, and now given its first independent airing. The collection ends with a homage to Charles Dickens, of which the Sunday Telegraph said, 'so rousingly old-fashioned, so intelligent, so heart-felt, so politically incorrect and so correct in every way that matters, that it makes you want to dance naked through the streets brandishing a copy of Great Expectations.'