SOURCE: A review of Death Dance: Twenty-five Stories, in The Saturday Review, New York, Vol. LII, No. 27, July 5, 1969, pp. 33-4.

Oates is an American fiction writer and critic who is perhaps best known for her novel Them (1969), which won a National Book Award in 1970. Her fiction is noted for its exhaustive presentation of realistic detail as well as its striking imagination, especially in the evocation of abnormal psychological states. As a critic, Oates has written on a remarkable diversity of authors—from Shakespeare to Herman Melville to Samuel Beckett—and is appreciated for the individuality and erudition that characterize her critical work. In this favorable review, Oates comments on the preoccupation with death that plagues many of Wilson's characters.

Here are stories from Angus Wilson's The Wrong Set, Such Darling Dodos, and A Bit Off the Map—masterful, concise, rather macabre tales of postwar England. The collection is...