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Stories
by Helen Simpson
A new collection of stories - dazzling, poignant, wickedly funny, and highly addictive - by the internationally acclaimed writer whose work The Times (London) calls "dangerously close to perfection." These thirteen stories brilliantly focus on aspects of contemporary living and unerringly capture a generation, a type, a social class, a pattern of behavior. They give us the small detail that reveals large secrets and summons up the inner stresses of our lives ("It is a blissful relief to turn to the coolness and clarity of Helen Simpson... She is, to my mind, the best short story writer now working in English" - Ed Crooks, Financial Times). Whether her subject is single women or wives in stages of midlife-ery, marriage or motherhood, youth, young love, homework, or history, Simpson writes near to the bone and close to the heart.
In one story, a squirrel trapped under a dustbin lid in the back garden vanishes, and a woman's marriage is revealed in the process... In another, a young woman on her way for an MRI reflects on new love, electromagnetism, and Sherlock Holmes, and afterward goes to a museum and finds herself wanting to escape into one of the paintings.
And in the title story, two men on a flight from London to Chicago - one an elderly scientist, the other a businessman upgraded to first class - discuss climate change and what flying is doing to "our shrunken planet," this while the "in-flight entertainment" shows the crop-duster scene from Hitchcock's North by Northwest. When a passenger in the seat across the aisle suddenly becomes ill and dies, the plane is forced to land in Goose Bay, Labrador, to the utter frustration of the two men. In the story's moment of reckoning, one of the men, furious at the delay, says to the other, "I don't care about you. You don't care about me. We don't care about him [the deceased passenger]. We all know how to put ourselves first, and that's what makes the world go round."
"Starred Review. If there's a flaw to be found in Simpson's latest collection of stories... it's that they're so clever they can distract readers from the characters as they admire the author's technique." - Publishers Weekly
"Starred Review. Simpson has proven her mastery of a difficult form." - Booklist
"Short and sharp, the latest stories from the award-winning British author are as pointed as ever, with many of them pointed toward imminent ecological disaster." - Kirkus Reviews
"I hope I have not given the impression that Simpson is a man-hating monomaniac. Her stories, like the best stories, give the impression of being the last word on the subject, even if, or especially if, that word is enigmatic and open-ended." - The Guardian (UK)
"References to climate change inform subsequent stories, including "Diary of an Interesting Year", but it's hard not to feel a little brow-beaten. The best stories remain Simpson's acerbic, humorous portraits of middle-class metropolitan life." - The Independent (UK)
"A good story is made of bones. It's the reader's job to flesh it into intimacy. In Helen Simpson's adventurous new collection the best stories rattle like skeletons; the worst, squelch." - The Spectator (UK)
This information about In-Flight Entertainment was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Helen Simpson is the author of four previous collections of short stories - Getting a Life, Four Bare Legs in a Bed (winner of the Somerset Maugham Award), Dear George, and In the Driver's Seat - as well as one novel, Flesh and Grass. She is the recipient of the E. M. Forster Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Visit her website at www.helensimpsonwriter.com.
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