Difficulties of a Bridegroom. Collected Short Stories.

First edition thus. 8vo. Pp. ix, 159. Dark blue cloth boards, lettered in ecru to spine. Jacket photograph of the Murewa Cave rock painting [courtesy of The National Museums and Monuments of Zimbabwe].

Author's first collection of short fiction. "These nine pieces hang together, in my mind, as an accompaniment to my poems." So says Ted Hughes in the foreword to this collection, taken from forty years of occasional story-writing. Of the nine items, six are from Wodwo, Ted Hughes's 1967 collection of poems and other writings, while The Head has appeared only in a magazine, and The Deadfall in a 1993 anthology of ghost stories put together by Michael Morpurgo. O'Kelly's Angel, written soon after the author's graduation, has never been published before. "Powerful. Sex, death, destruction, fear, the sheer heavy depth of existence burn through almost every paragraph." –The Los Angeles Times

[Sagar & Tabor A111a.1]