A Cupboardful of Shoes

After a life dedicated to the study of languages, A. Colin Wright has distilled his life's observations into this engaging collection of short stories, most of which have been previously published in literary journals. Now retired, his life's adventures, which include serving in the British Air Force, attending Cambridge University, and being a professor of Russian, have inspired this collection.

"I'm a librarian and I kissed a film star once. I touched her nipples too. At least, I think I did." So begins "Queen's Grill." Horatio Humphries, one of the unreliable narrators, strikes up a brief friendship with a movie star on a rough Atlantic crossing, but his "twin" brother doesn't believe him. In "A Pregnant Woman with Parcels at Brock and Bagot," an unnamed woman may or may not have an affair with a man she met at a party-depending on whether she can get by a woman in front of her. "Distantly from Gardens," a variant on the theme of the "double" found often in Russian literature, presents a man with a split personality, inhabited by two narrators who are his past as well as his present. While other stories are told in either the first or third person, the subject here demands the use of the second.

The stories in A Cupboardful of Shoes explore subjects as wide-ranging as largely disappointed love, violence, and war, sometimes with an underlying religious theme, serving to illustrate Wright's eclectic style and literary interests.