The Times Literary Supplement (4 December 1959) called Francis King "a writer perfectly equipped for the short story." John Nicholson (London Times, 20 November 1980) writes: "His themes are grand, and his achievement is to blind us to the limitations of the short story, and to make us forget why it has gone out of fashion." For the past forty years King's stories have appeared in such major British periodicals as the Listener, London Magazine, Encounter, and New Review and in such major anthologies as Best Short Stories, Best Short Stories, and Penguin Modern Stories. He has explored personal relationships in a humanist, realist tradition, often focusing on the "desirous passion, not uninformed by morality" identified by Barbara Hardy as his main theme, sometimes amid social comedy and in a variety of global settings--especially Greece, Japan, and England--"a genuinely cosmopolitan writer," as Sylvia Clayton calls him (Times Literary Supplement, 14 November 1980). His...