SOURCE: Lorberer, Eric. Review of The World and Other Places, by Jeanette Winterson. Review of Contemporary Fiction 19, no. 2 (summer 1999): 143–44.

In the following review, Lorberer offers a positive assessment of The World and Other Places.

Fans of Jeanette Winterson's laconic prose will find much to enjoy in this [The World and Other Places], the author's first collection of short fiction. Culling stories from the last twelve years, this book shows that Winterson can sculpt her sentences as precisely in the short form as she does in the novel. Her gift for imagery is startling, whether noticing an aged woman (“with a face like a love-note somebody crushed in his fist”) or a dinner table suspended in the air by chains: “an armoury of knives and forks laid out in case the eaters knocked one into the abyss.” Despite the deft, self-deprecating irony that finds expression in her characters, Winterson's...