Medusa's Ankles collects mesmeric, tantalizing short stories from over the course of Man Booker Prize-winning author A.S. Byatt's career. In "The July Ghost," a tenant discovers he is the only person who can see the ghost of his landlord's dead son, while in "Precipice-Encurled," a painter develops an obsession with the woman he is sketching. Other stories focus more explicitly on the horrific and transcendent experiences of the female body, as with "A Stone Woman," which explores the transformation of a woman to literal stone after the death of her mother, and the titular "Medusa's Ankles," which follows the thoughts of one woman in a salon chair as she free-associates about her hairdresser and the Matisse print hanging nearby.
As in her novels, Byatt's (Possession; Peacock & Vine) shorter works display her fluent, luminous prose. Even in her most realistic stories, dark and glittering descriptions--"matt, brick, cream, a grape-dark sheen on the claw-ends, a dingy, earthy encrustation on the hairy legs"--bewitch readers into an otherworldly experience. While some pieces, such as "Dragon's Breath," make their connection to fairy tales overt, all of Byatt's stories ask readers to consider the imaginative connections that reside alongside everyday life. Whether focused on unsettling feminist truths in "The Chinese Lobster" and "Dolls' Eyes," or meditating on loss through a transformed experience of the body in both "A Stone Woman" and "Medusa's Ankles," Byatt is always glancing backward while she is looking ahead, forging the connective tissue between old tales and new ones in a celebration of the power of storytelling. --Alice Martin, freelance writer and editor