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THE PENGUIN BOOK OF MODERN BRITISH SHORT STORIES

Malcolm Bradbury was a novelist, critic, television dramatist, Emeritus Professor of American Studies at the University of East Anglia and cofounder there, with Angus Wilson, of the creative writing MA course. His novels include Eating People is Wrong (1959); Stepping Westward (1965); The History Man (1975), which won the Royal Society of Literature Heinemann Prize and was adapted as a famous television series; Rates of Exchange (1983), which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize; Cuts: A Very Short Novel (1987), also televised; and Doctor Criminale (1992). His critical works include The Modern American Novel (1984; revised edition, 1992), No, Not Bloomsbury (essays, 1987), The Modern World: Ten Great Writers (1988), From Puritanism to Postmodernism: A History of American Literature (with Richard Ruland, 1991), The Modern British Novel (1993) and Dangerous Pilgrimages (1995). He edited Modernism (with James McFarlane, 1976), The Penguin Book of Modern British Short Stories (1988) and The Atlas of Literature (1997). He was also the author of a collection of stories and parodies, Who Do You Think You Are? (1976), and several works of humour and satire, including Why Come to Slaka? (1986), Unsent Letters (1988; revised edition, 1995) and Mensonge (1987). He wrote many television plays, in particular the television ‘novels’ The Gravy Train and The Gravy Train Goes East, and he adapted several books for television and film, including Tom Sharpe’s Porterhouse Blue, Kingsley Amiss The Green Man and Stella Gibbons’s Cold Comfort Farm.

Malcolm Bradbury was awarded the CBE in 1991 for his services to Literature and was knighted in the 2000 New Year’s Honours List. He died in November 2000.

THE PENGUIN BOOK OF

MODERN BRITISH SHORT STORIES

Edited with an Introduction by Malcolm Bradbury

PENGUIN BOOKS

PENGUIN BOOKS

Published by the Penguin Group

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First published by Viking 1987

Published in Penguin Books 1988

This selection and Introduction copyright © Malcolm Bradbury, 1987

All rights reserved

Pages 8–10 constitute an extension of this copyright page

Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser