Journalist, novelist and biographer DJ Taylor’s latest offering collects stories written between 1991 and 2014, but his sharp, clever portraits have plenty in common. Art often clashes with commerce and modernity, and is usually elbowed aside. Put-upon poetry teacher Mr Crowther, driving from a meeting with his jargon-spewing headmaster to his house, where a woman called Finula is talking about mead, has “a nasty feeling that he was being got at for believing things whose superiority he could not absolutely prove”. Elsewhere an elderly couple look back in a strange secluded house, a weather girl warns of apocalypse and a stuntman arrives in a small Tennessee town. British arts graduates, with jobs in the media and education and a resentment of business folk who earn more than them, crop up regularly. Life, like the dawn that smears up the cloud “like a very pale egg yolk dragged out over a plate”, is largely disappointing, and most relationships are failing. Yet if his stories tread similar ground, Taylor has a great knack of pulling the reader in, and his endings, which spin out into rather mournful, very British epiphanies, linger long in the mind.
• Wrote for Luck is published by Galley Beggar Press (RRP £8.99)
