A.S. Byatt's stories simmer with a sensuality and passion that, like topiary trees in a formal garden, are pruned and trained into cultivated shapes while retaining the wild scent of the orchard. In "Crocodile Tears" a woman walks away from a personal tragedy, deserting those she loves to try to reconcile herself to a death for which she feels horribly responsible. Thrown together in Nîmes with another exiled mourner, a Norwegian full of northern folktales, she ricochets between a numbed calm and a reckless urge for self-destruction. Together they begin to assemble some kind of personal solace out of fragments of European history, fiction, and myth, and so come to terms with their guilt. "A Lamia in the Cevennes" is also set in France, where another isolated English exile struggles for self-knowledge amid the shards of history and folktale. "Cold" is itself a kind of latter-day fairy story of ice princesses and sighing suitors. These are stories steeped in light and color, full of glowing landscapes and sensuous delights. Their intricately woven skeins of literary allusion and keenly observed locations bewitch the reader. Yet the figures in Byatt's landscapes seem powerless to derive pleasure or solace from their surroundings, picking their lonely way through the brilliance, carrying with them burdens of painful memories they cannot shake off. --Lisa Jardine, Amazon.co.uk

From Publishers Weekly
Brilliantly mingling reality with the surreal atmosphere of folktales and fairy tales, Byatt follows The Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye with an equally virtuosic and beguiling collection. The subtitle is the key to the oppositions that inspire these six stories. They teem with contrasts between inexplicable compulsions and societal norms, the extremes of love and hate, the mysterious tension between the rational and the mystic, and between the creation of art and the demands of daily life. Byatt's meticulous control of language gives these narratives a visual and tactile dimension that's almost palpable. Permeated with descriptions of colors, temperatures and atmosphere, full of sensuous imagery, each is an immersion in a richly imagined world. A compulsion to flee from the reality of her husband's dead body sends the protagonist of "Crocodile Tears" to sun-drenched Nimes, where she meets a man from Norway who is researching folktales common to both regions. Slowly and agonizingly, each regains the ability to deal with loss. In "Cold," Fiammarosa, the princess of a mythical kingdom, can exist only in a frigid atmosphere, but she marries a prince from a desert realm where burning sand is spun into glass; the contrastAand the eventual mingling of the two polaritiesAis conveyed in passages of gorgeous description. The protagonists of most of these stories work in the creative arts or have strong ties to literature. (Interestingly, the central character of the one disappointing tale, "Baglady," a nightmarish scenario that lacks resolution, does not.) "The world is full of light and life, and the true crime is not to be interested in it," says a painter, one of the characters in "Christ in the House of Martha and Mary." Byatt conveys this conviction via an unfettered imagination, an intense lyricism combined with distilled and crystalline prose, and an astute grasp of the contradictory impulses of human nature. Six illustrations. Author tour. Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
This collection of three long stories and three brief ones by the author of, most recently, The Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye (LJ 12/97), features her trademark fairy tale and magical elements as well as the age-old complexities of human nature. In "Crocodile Tears," while fiftyish couple Tony and Patricia Nimmo are touring a small art gallery after lunch one Sunday, he drops dead. Patricia inexplicably runs away, fleeing not only the scene but the country. She sets herself up in a hotel in France until she can manage her shock and grief. "Cold" is truly a fairy tale: a young princess who, legend has it, is descended from an ice maiden, can't bear warmth and comfort. She prefers dancing naked in the snow and thus presents a challenge to the king when it comes time to find her a suitable mate. These stories create appealing worlds of fantasy and truth and should prove popular with fiction readers.-AAnn H. Fisher, Radford P.L., VA Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

The New York Times Book Review, Fernanda Eberstadt
Elementals is ... full of light and life, the throwaway gleams of a writer at the height of her powers.

The Wall Street Journal, Gabriella Stern
...[a] sparkling collection.... her vivid prose leaps and pirouettes, shimmies and shivers, in stories that touch on themes of art and desire, isolation and betrayal.

The New York Times, Hilma Wolitzer
...the longer stories, fired by a fierce intelligence and related in shimmering prose, evolve from idea to execution in unexpected and thrillingly persuasive leaps. This eclectic little volume should delight A.S. Byatt's devoted readers and attract many new ones.

The Los Angeles Times Sunday Book Review, Jonathan Levi
[Elementals] harnesses a brilliant new power that makes laissez faire reading impossible.... Byatt has descended beneath the surface of her intellectuals to quarry the myths below poetry and painting, to mine the classical and biblical sources of the Keats and Matisse and religious studies courses that have hitherto engaged her characters.

From Kirkus Reviews
Six rather arbitrarily linked stories (which allegedly explore various ``extremes and polarities'') from the rococo stylist whose best fiction includes Booker Prizewinning Possession (1990) and the (rather similar) story collection The Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye (1997). Exotic locales and almost oppressively lush imagery dominate even such slight fictions as ``Baglady'' (set in a vast shopping mall in the ``Far East'' and redolent, if not reeking, of Muriel Spark); ``Jael'' (which employs the biblical Apocryphal story of Jael and Sisera to explain a moody commercial artist's tendency ``to rejoice in wickedness''; and ``Christ in the House of Martha and Mary,'' a witty parable in which an insubordinate cook is taught by a young artist to cherish even the evanescent glories of her own ``Creation.'' More interesting, and more precisely built on defining contrasts, are the longer stories: ``A Lamia in the Cevennes,'' about an Englishman's retirement to the French countryside to paintand to find, in his custom-built outdoor swimming pool, aesthetic and other temptations; and (the unfortunately titled) ``Crocodile Tears,'' about a suddenly widowed Englishwoman who escapes to the southern French city of Nimes (drenched in artifact-reminders of its past as a Roman outpost), and a transformative acquaintance with a Norwegian tourist whose burden of loss both reflects and mocks her own: it's a dizzily amusing, oddly seductive tale of cultural and psychological conflict. The best piece is ``Cold,'' a deliciously imagined fairytale whose heroine, the beautiful princess Fiammarosa, unexpectedly departs the invigorating northern clime where she thrives to marry a prince (and expert glassblower) from a barren desert country. Her life is soon indeed imperilled, but the prince's creation of an ``artificial world'' magically preserves herand their union. This is a brilliant and charming variation on its announced theme, namely that ``Love changes people.'' An often enchanting further display of Byatt's fluent style and far-reaching imagination. -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Review
"Fired by a fierce intelligence and related in shimmering prose.  This eclectic little volume should delight A. S. Byatt's devoted readers and attract many new ones."  -The New York Times

"A stunning display.... Elementals combines finely wrought stories with imagery as sparkling as jewels.  It is a work that should not be missed."  -The Denver Post

"A wonderful book-complex, amusing, clever, and thought-provoking--a reader's dream."  -The Plain Dealer

Review
"Fired by a fierce intelligence and related in shimmering prose.  This eclectic little volume should delight A. S. Byatt's devoted readers and attract many new ones."  -The New York Times

"A stunning display.... Elementals combines finely wrought stories with imagery as sparkling as jewels.  It is a work that should not be missed."  -The Denver Post

"A wonderful book-complex, amusing, clever, and thought-provoking--a reader's dream."  -The Plain Dealer

Book Description
From the booker Prize-winning author of Possession comes this richly imaginitive story collection that transports the reader to a world where opposites--passion and loneliness, betrayal and loyalty, fire and ice--clash and converge.

A beautiful ice maiden risks her life when she falls in love with a desert prince, whose passionate touches scorch her delicate skin. A woman flees the scene of her husband's heart attack, leaving her entire past behind her. Striving to master color and line, a painter discovers the resolution to his artisitc problems when a beautiful and magical water snake appears in his pool. And a wealthy Englishwoman gradually loses her identity while wandering through a shopping mall. Elegantly crafter and suffused with boundless wisdom, these bewitching tales are a testament to a writer at the hieght of her powers.

From the Inside Flap
From the booker Prize-winning author of Possession comes this richly imaginitive story collection that transports the reader to a world where opposites--passion and loneliness, betrayal and loyalty, fire and ice--clash and converge.

A beautiful ice maiden risks her life when she falls in love with a desert prince, whose passionate touches scorch her delicate skin. A woman flees the scene of her husband's heart attack, leaving her entire past behind her. Striving to master color and line, a painter discovers the resolution to his artisitc problems when a beautiful and magical water snake appears in his pool. And a wealthy Englishwoman gradually loses her identity while wandering through a shopping mall. Elegantly crafter and suffused with boundless wisdom, these bewitching tales are a testament to a writer at the hieght of her powers.

From the Back Cover
"Fired by a fierce intelligence and related in shimmering prose. This eclectic little volume should delight A. S. Byatt's devoted readers and attract many new ones." -The New York Times

"A stunning display.... Elementals combines finely wrought stories with imagery as sparkling as jewels. It is a work that should not be missed." -The Denver Post

"A wonderful book-complex, amusing, clever, and thought-provoking--a reader's dream." -The Plain Dealer



About the Author
A.S. Byatt is the author of the novels Possession (winner of the Booker Prize in 1990), The Game, and the sequence The Virgin in the Garden, Still Life, and Babel Tower. She has also written two novellas, published together as Angels and Insects, and four collections of shorter works, including The Matisse Stories and The Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye. Educated at Cambridge, she was a senior lecturer in English at University College, London, before becoming a full-time writer in 1983. A distinguished critic as well as a novelist, she lives in London.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

This collection deals with betrayal and loyalty, quests and longings, loneliness and passion - the mysterious absences at the heart of the fullest lives. A woman walks away from her previous existence and encounters an ice-blond stranger from a secretive world; a schoolgirl draws a blood-filled picture of the biblical heroine Jael; a swimming pool reveals a beauteous monster in its depths. The settings of Elementals range from the heat of Provence in summer to the cold forests of Scandinavia, from chalk-strewn classrooms to herb-scented hillsides, from suburban streets to rocky wilds.

FROM THE CRITICS

The Independent

Opening Elementals, it's the reader who can feel given a prize when such an eminently enjoyable and readable book comes her way. Part of Byatt's gift as a short-story writer is her obvious relish of the form. As you read, you feel what a good time she is having, how she is just letting herself dive in and play....The hedonist, art-lover and poet in her take center stage.

Daily Telegraph

A weighty intellect is at play in a new collection of short stories... Sensuous.... They are suffused with a sensuous frivolity normally held in check in her longer fictions.

Times Literary Supplement

Intriguing....A beguiling vision....Colour, shape, texture, shine and the very chemical composition of substances are lovingly detailed in her work. At times, her descriptions are as vivid and etched as illustrations from a book of fairy tales.

Fernanda Eberstadt

The disjunction between...art's wide enchantment and a snobbish parochialism, is central to Byatt's writing....Elementals is...full of light and life, the throwaway gleams of a writer at the height of her powers. —The New York Times Book Review

Library Journal