The Oxford look of Scottish Short Stories, edited by Douglas Dunn (Oxford, £7.99 in UK)

Somehow you do not equate Scottish writing with short stories, and in fact it has produced few outstanding specialists in the…

Somehow you do not equate Scottish writing with short stories, and in fact it has produced few outstanding specialists in the genre. Yet the roll call of names in this collection is impressive James Hogg, Walter Scott, John Galt, R.L. Stevenson, Lewis Grassic Gibbon, John Buchan, Muriel Spark, George Mackay Brown, etc. The playwright J.M. Barrie is roped in and so is the novelist Neil Gunn, not very successfully, and John Davidson. the poet. One obvious, and strange, omission is that of "Saki", born Hector Neil Munro and very much a Scot in spite of a high degree of anglicisation. In all, nearly 500 pages of small rather too small print.