“... tale belongs to a darker, more Faulknerian strain of fiction. When she was a teenager, her father, James Druck, was implicated in a notorious scam that involved killing horses in order to claim on the insurance; he ended his daughter’s promising equestrian career by paying someone to electrocute her prize pony. After that, she seems to have had, as they ...”

“... gothic in mood, but has a plainness and tact. Sometimes, in these pages, one wishes for what Henry James (apropos of Poe) called ‘the indispensable history of somebody’s normal relation to something’.The best​ of the stories stand out because they slip the noose and allow contingency into their version of things. Henri Thomas’s ‘The ...”

“... General Alberto Bayo, a Spanish career officer who had fought against the Moroccans and against Franco during the Thirties. Exiled to Mexico at the end of the Spanish Civil War, he had begun a new life, training youthful Caribbean revolutionaries. When Fidel (whose own father came to Cuba during an earlier Spanish emigration) was casting around for a ...”