Book description
Towards the end of Angus Wilson's life his short stories were
entombed in a collected volume. By way of signifying the corpus was
sadly complete that made sense but it didn't do justice to the
importance and quality of his work in this medium. Three volumes of
short stories were published - The Wrong Set, Such Darling Dodos and A
Bit Off the Map. Faber Finds are reissuing these original selections.
Angus Wilson made his initial reputation by his short stories, The
Wrong Set and Such Darling Dodos being his first two published books,
appearing in 1949 and 1950 respectively. When reviewing Such Darling
Dodos C. P. Snow perceptively wrote, 'Part-bizarre, part-savage and
part-maudlin, there is nothing much like it on the contemporary scene.
It is rather as though a man of acute sensibility felt left out of the
human party, and was surveying it, half-enviously,
half-contemptuously, from the corner of the room, determined to
strip-off the comfortable pretences and show that this party is pretty
horrifying after all ... Sometimes the effect is too mad to be
pleasant, sometimes most moving; no one could deny Mr Wilson's gift.'
As Margaret Drabble points out in her biography of Angus Wilson (to be
reissued in Faber Finds) his stories were in their own way to be as
iconoclastic and irreverent as John Osborne's plays were to be. They
not so much deserve as demand to be re-read.
One of Britain s most distinguished novelists Sir Angus Wilson was
born in 1913. Educated at Westminster and Merton College, Oxford he
joined the British Museum as a cataloguer before being called for
service in 1941. His literary career began with a collection of
short-stories published in 1949. These were followed by other
short-story collections, novels and plays. Co-founder with Malcolm
Bradbury of the MA programme in creative writing at the University of
East Anglia, Wilson was appointed professor in 1967. Chair of many
literary panels, including the Booker prize, and campaigner for
homosexual equality he was knighted in 1980. He died in 1991.
