''A Bit Off the Map, and Other Stories'' is a

1957 1957 (Roman numerals, MCMLVII) was a Common year starting on Wednesday, common year starting on Tuesday of the Gregorian calendar, the 1957th year of the Common Era (CE) and ''Anno Domini'' (AD) designations, the 957th year of the 2nd millennium, t ...

collection of eight short stories written by

Angus Wilson Sir Angus Frank Johnstone-Wilson, CBE (11 August 191331 May 1991) was an English novelist and short story writer. He was one of England's first openly gay authors. He was awarded the 1958 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for '' The Middle Age o ...

Background

The book is Wilson's third collection of short stories.MacKay, Marina. "A Bit Off the Map". The Literary Encyclopedia. 8 January 2001
accessed 26 June 2009.
/ref> It takes its title from the first story included in the collection.

Stories

The stories in ''A Bit Off the Map'' include "A Flat Country Christmas", "Once A Lady", and "More Friend Than Lodger". Wilson reveals the motives behind the pompous behaviour of his characters. The stories intersperse the ironic, as a way of deflating the premises of the facades the characters have erected.

Characters

Marina MacKay, of

Washington University in St. Louis Washington University in St. Louis (WashU or WUSTL) is a private research university with its main campus in St. Louis County, and Clayton, Missouri. Founded in 1853, the university is named after George Washington. Washington University i ...

, says the characters in the collection, "are struggling to find their place on England's post-war map." She takes particular note of Kennie, the hero of "A Bit Off the Map." She calls him "a mentally subnormal

Teddy boy The Teddy Boys or Teds were a mainly British youth subculture of the mid 1950s to mid 1960s who were interested in rock and roll and R&B music, wearing clothes partly inspired by the styles worn by dandies in the Edwardian period, which S ...

who drifts around cafes, infatuated with an untalented, artistic crowd."

Reception

Critical reception of the story was generally quite positive. Reviewing the collection in the year of its release, ''

Time Time is the continued sequence of existence and events that occurs in an apparently irreversible succession from the past, through the present, into the future. It is a component quantity of various measurements used to sequence events, t ...

'' magazine called it "brilliantly readable", and noted that "there is no denying the sneering precision of his observations.""Brilliant Gossip"
a review in ''Time Magazine'', 25 November 1957.

References

Short story collections by Angus Wilson 1957 short story collections Secker & Warburg books {{1950s-story-collection-stub