“Yes,” said James.
Deanna Bright shrugged and left rather early.
On the television, in broad daylight, the Teletubbies were sitting on the end of their casket-shaped cradles, swathed in shimmering coverlets like parachute silk, or those silvery blankets wrapped around those rescued from hypothermia or drowning. They lay down to sleep like nodding ninepins, each snoring his or her differentiated snore. Nightnight Teletubbies said the mid-Atlantic motherly voice in the cathode tubing. Night, said mad Mado, more and more angrily, night, night, night, night, night.
“Come to bed,” said James, very gently, adjusting the pink ribbon.
“Night,” said Mado.
“Just a rest, for a while,” said James.
Acknowledgements
THERE ARE MANY PEOPLE I should like to thank for help with these stories. I am particularly grateful to Danielle Olsen, who made real my imagined work of art with the help of the Wellcome Collection. I am also grateful to Siân Ede, whose knowledge of contemporary art was invaluable, and whose opinions are tough. Dr. Hamish McMichen was most helpful with medical matters—my mistakes are my own. “A Stone Woman” is dedicated to Torfi Tulinius, whose scholarly knowledge of Iceland and love of its landscape made me see the country. I am grateful to Dominic Gregory for commissioning “Raw Material” to be read aloud at the Ilkley Literature Festival. Harriet Harvey-Wood, Ignês Sodré, and my editor Jenny Uglow will know what more than one of the stories owes to talking to them. My daughters Antonia and Miranda were helpful with Teletubbies; Miranda also helped with body-piercing.
I am, as always, grateful to my publishers, Chatto and Windus and Vintage, in England, and Knopf and Vintage in the United States. Also to my agents, Peters Fraser and Dunlop in the UK and Sterling Lord Literistic in the States. My assistant, Lindsey Andrews, makes writing possible.
Finally, this book is dedicated to my German translator and to my Italian translators, all good friends and precise readers. Talking to them over the years has changed my writing, and my reading.
A. S. BYATT
Little Black Book of Stories
A. S. Byatt is the author of numerous novels, including A Whistling Woman and Possession, which was awarded the Booker Prize in 1990. She has also written two novellas, published together as Angels & Insects, four previous collections of shorter works, and several works of nonfiction. Educated at Cambridge, she was a senior lecturer in English at University College, London. She lives in London.
ALSO BY A. S. BYATT
Fiction
The Game
The Virgin in the Garden
Still Life
Sugar and Other Stories
Possession: A Romance
Angels & Insects
The Matisse Stories
The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye
Babel Tower
Elementals
The Biographer’s Tale
A Whistling Woman
Vintage Byatt
Criticism
Degrees of Freedom: The Novels of Iris Murdoch
Unruly Times: Wordsworth and Coleridge
Passions of the Mind: Selected Writings
Imagining Characters (with Ignês Sodré)
On Histories and Stories: Selected Essays
Portraits in Fiction
FIRST VINTAGE INTERNATIONAL EDITION, MARCH 2005
Copyright © 2003 by A. S. Byatt
Vintage is a registered trademark and Vintage International and
colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.
The Library of Congress has cataloged the Knopf edition as follows:
Byatt, A.S. (Antonia Susan), [date]
Little black book of stories / A. S. Byatt.—1st ed.
p. cm.
Raw material—The pink ribbon.
I. Title.
PR6052.Y2L58 2004
823’.914—dc22
2003065940
www.vintagebooks.com
www.randomhouse.com
eISBN: 978-0-307-42663-5
v3.0