SOURCE: Bliss, Carolyn. Review of Collected Stories, by Peter Carey. World Literature Today 70, no. 3 (summer 1996): 757.

In the following review, Bliss lauds the selection of short stories in Carey's Collected Stories, particularly complimenting Carey's ability to leave “himself emotionally naked when writing of his own experience.”

Peter Carey's Collected Stories contains little that is new, but what is new is wonderful, and what is old is wonderful as well. I intend that adjective literally: the stories excite wonder and are full of wonders.

The collection holds virtually all the short stories gathered in the books which marked Carey's debut, The Fat Man in History (1974) and War Crimes (1979), both published by the University of Queensland Press in Australia. Less than half of the stories from these two volumes were subsequently culled for The Fat Man in History and Other Stories, published in 1980 by Random House in New York and by...