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''The Atmospheric Railway: New and Selected Stories'', is a 2008 short story collection by British author Shena Mackay comprising thirteen new stories, and twenty-three selected from earlier collections.〔(Random House ) Retrieved 2012-08-13.〕 ==Reception== Reviews are generally positive : *Jane Shilling of ''The Daily Telegraph'' writes "Her themes are generally contained within a domestic framework. She writes about families, loneliness, railways, suburbia, cats, clothes, old age, poets, shape-shifting, the oppression of kindness and the fatal stab of unkindness. Her style has a lyric elegance that has deceived critics into describing her, with that most dismissive term of faint praise, as 'gentle'. But she is not gentle. She writes with a beautiful, controlled savagery of (to borrow one of her own phrases) 'the familiar tenderised and made strange by the darkness'. There are other writers with this gift - Helen Simpson, Hilary Mantel, Jane Gardam come to mind. Mackay resembles them both in the beauty of her prose and in the absolute originality of her voice."〔(Jane Shilling hails a virtuoso who reveals the human condition through tales of cats and washing machines ), ''The Telegraph'', 13 Nov 2008〕 *Aamer Hussein in ''The Independent'' finishes his review with "The bizarre and the banal, the half-remembered and the yet-to-come, brilliantly intertwine in the sentences of this most imaginative yet most practical of writers".〔(Some real magic – and fake mistletoe ), ''The Independent'', 21 November 2008〕 *Booktrust says "This is a wonderfully bittersweet selection of works by one of the modern masters of the short story. Shena Mackay is always entertaining, even as she conveys the humour and poignancy of relationships beset by the ravages of time and family life, as well as hard-earned compassion for her characters.〔(Booktrust ) Retrieved 2012-08-13.〕 *Alyssa McDonald in the ''New Statesman'' writes "There are many writers who can elicit much feeling from a rollicking plot, but very few can manipulate the dreaminess of memory and fantasy with such exacting precision, or make the minutiae of other people's lives so sympathetic."〔(Regrets, I've had a few ), ''New Statesman'', 30 October 2008.〕 *However Jenny Turner writing in ''The Guardian'' says the stories are "fabulous in patches, but do not quite add up"〔(Jenny Turner celebrates the sinister, hilarious vision of Shena Mackay ) ''The Guardian'', 15 November 2008.〕 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「The Atmospheric Railway」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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