Alphabet Garden

This collection is the result of a group of publishers from twelve countries getting together at the Frankfurt Bookfair in 1992, where they decided that each of them would commission a writer from their country to write a short story. All the other publishers would then translate these stories and publish them simultaneously in all twelve countries during the 1994 Frankfurt Bookfair, the result being this volume.Pete Ayrton's Introduction is very brief (just over a page long), but I found his most insightful comment to be: "In order to be universal, good writing must be local: that is, deeply rooted in a specific culture." A useful pointer for my short story writing, but I found that, in the case of this collection, if 'local is lekker' (a South Africanism meaning local is nice), then these stories are insufficiently embedded in their local milieu to be regarded as 'good'. Very little distinguishes each short story as a product of its own country. However, I DID enjoy them, especially the exquisite sensitivity of 'Something red' by Paolo Capriolo (representative of Italian writing) and the colloquial style of 'Paleface' by Menis Koumandareas (representative of the writing of Greece).No doubt if you choose to read them, you will find your own favourites - they are a wide range, sufficiently so to appeal to most literary palates. A pity that the collection now appears to be out of print.