This is exactly why I love A.S. Byatt books! I've finished Sugar & Other Stories and enjoyed every page. And how many writers can one say that about? It's only recently that I've begun reading all of her short story collections and I can't figure out why I've waited so long (that pesky -- and disappearing -- bias against short stories, perhaps?).

I particularly enjoyed the stories "Loss of Face" -- about an encounter at a literature conference -- and "Precipice-Encurled" -- in which the travel plans of Robert Browning are an excuse to examine the elusivity of art and love in the characters Juliana Fishwick and Joshua Riddell -- but that's not to say the others don't still inhabit my imagination and challenge my sense of what is possible in a work of fiction.

I love how Byatt blends the unseen with the mundane, the poetry with the prose. How does she pull it off every time? It doesn't matter whether ghosts or other equally uncanny figures wander in and out of the narrative, the threads of story all hold together and pull the reader along.

Some of my favourite bits . . .

George Eliot, as quoted in the short story "Loss of Face":

"A human life, I think, should be well rooted in some spot of a native land, where it may get the love of a tender kinship for the face of the earth."

Also from the same story:

"Celia thought of art as a work of rescue. These fragments, said T.S. Eliot, I have shored against my ruin, speaking of various eclectically framed morsels of Dante, Wagner, Middleton, the Upanishads, Hamlet, and so on . . ."

And from "Precipice-Encurled":

"His paint was light. He had painted, not the thing seen, but the act of seeing. So now, Joshua thought, as the first thin films of mist began to approach his eyrie, I want to note down these shifting, these vanishing veils."

Also from "Precipice-Encurled" but from Robert Browning's musings:

"Even the greatest tragedies in his life had rarely stirred him directly to composition. They left him mute. He should hate any mechanical attempt to do what would only acquire worth from being a spontaneous outflow. Poems arose like birds setting off from stray twigs of facts to flight of more or less distance, unpredictably and often after many years."

One learns so much from a bit of Byatt prose.