From the Academy

The Academy is a great store of knowledge and opinion about great books. From time to time we ask its members to write a short piece on books they have admired. Here are some of their responses, most recently about 2015 Folio Prize winner Akhil Sharma’s Family Life, and further back about the one book they would have liked to win the Prize if it had always existed.

Ben Markovits on The Collected Stories by Peter Taylor (2009)

I’d like to nominate Peter Taylor’s Collected Stories, which was published by FSG in 2009. He was a New Yorker writer for a long time, and won a Pulitzer for his novel A Summons to Memphis in 1987, but he doesn’t seem to be much read now. Which is a shame, because he’s terrific. I prefer many of his short stories to that novel, including several in this collection. 1939 (about a pair of creative writing students who travel to New York to meet their fiancées), and Dean of Men are particular favourites. He’s got a wonderfully natural descriptive style, which seems both honest and reserved, and he circles his subjects and circles his subjects until their importance, which might seem slight at first, grows and grows.