Onea

This is the second collection of short stories by Ian McEwan published in 1978 after First Love, Last Rites in 1975.
All these stories share a lot of darkness, perversity, and absurdity in many "unpopular" topics such as incest, morbid sexuality, murder, and toxic human relationships. I really loved how they give you the feeling and meaning of McEwan's later novels and his writing style.

As the author himself stated back then: "They were a kind of laboratory for me. They allowed me to try out different things, to discover myself as a writer."

Second collection of short stories of Ian Macabre, all sharing the themes of existential ennui and sexual perversion. They're intriguing and fairly disquieting although a couple feel like failed experiments.

"Pornography" is about a two-timing pornographer getting a nasty, emasculating comeuppance. "Reflections of a Kept Ape" has the title ape recall his sexual affair with a female writer who now ignores him. "Two Framents" shows two scenes in the life of a father caring for his young daughter in post-apocalyptic London. "Dead As They Come" tells a classic tale of love, bliss, jealousy and betrayal between a man and a... mannequin. "In Between the Sheets" focuses on another father-daughter story bordering on incest. "To and Fro"... I have no idea what it's about. "Psychopolis" is about a Brit expat having an existential crisis in "the vast, fragmented city without a centre" that is L.A.

I like the way McEwan sketches psychological profiles with effortless precision and the ever troubling yet subtle hints at the true depths that connect one character to another. The collection is great overall, though a few of the stories feel like facile writing exercises.

I wonder if I am not as let down as others who wrote such venomous reviews because I have never read McEwan before? people complained that this book made them feel uncomfortable, but I believe that was the goal of the author, to play with the readers emotions, to shock and repulse. I personally found the book a bit predictable and other than the first story didn't really enjoy it very much, but the subject matter nonetheless is taboo enough and described in such Hitchcockian detail that we are left no choice but to shift from foot to foot, hoping what is about to happen, isn't.

McEwan aims for the sacred and the stunted in this kit bag of the abnormal. Half of the stories were wonderful and the others felt plastic and abortive.

I've read quite a few of Ian McEwan's novels and enjoyed most of them, a couple of them i thought were legit masterpieces and future classics. So, i thought, his short stories ought to be quality as well, let's give them a try.
Bad move.
These are awful, written like a first year creative writing student trying to be edgy for the sake of being edgy. I don't know what was going on with Mc Ewan when he wrote these but i find it hard to believe that this is the same author who wrote "Lessons" and "Atonement" as these are not even in the same league.

I heard about this on the Books on the Nightstand podcast. Each of these stories pushes some kind of assumption, sex-related. I knew it was early McEwan so I was hoping for something more along the lines of The Comfort of Strangers but these are more focused on the concept in each story than the relationship between the characters. Quick read.

In Between the Sheets is Ian McEwan's second short story collection, after First Love, Last Rites - both published early in his career, in 1975 and 1978, and both containing very dark and disturbing literary experiments.

Unfortunately, while First Love, Last Rites is a genuine collection of interesting, experimental stories, In Between the Sheets is more like a collection of outtakes from that volume. Both collections feature stories that are twisted and macabre, but while in First Love the macabre is never out of place and all the gimmicks work, in In Between The Sheets they simply don't and fail leave much impact. The stories are often surreal - reflections of a Kept Ape is written in overblown and baroque prose by a literal ape, seduced and imprisoned by a woman who has written a bestselling novel, but now suffers from writer's block; Dead as They come has a man fall in love with a window mannequin. The opening story, Pornography, features no weird and bizarre elements from other shorts - its set in the London borough of Soho, with all its filth, decay and grime chronicled to a T. In the story two brothers work in a porn shop - one owns it, and the other tries to get customers to actually purchase some magazines and balances a relationship with two mistresses in the meantime - with a predictable ending. This story perhaps best illustrates how the collection has aged - who buys pornographic magazines nowadays, and are there still actual stores which have only this kind of stuff?

Best recommended for completists and fans of the author - though be prepared for something different, as it is a completely different Ian McEwan from theo ne who wrote Atonement or On Chesil Beach.

What a disappointment. It's like McEwan (or his publisher) took all the outtakes from the exquisite, Somerset Maugham award-winning First Love, Last Rites and stuck them in their own collection to capitalize on it. There was none of the sick beauty of his other work, which I know, love, and look for. Each of these stories seemed to be afterthoughts, or B-sides, if you will, but bad B-sides. At least this collection was mercifully short.

Me reí mucho.

decided to plow through mcewan's body of work only to discover that i kinda loathe the early stuff. and while i don't particularly enjoy slamming a writer i admire i find it encouraging that the same guy who wrote this piece o' shit went on to write atonement and on chesil beach. gives all of us toiling away in secrecy and mediocrity some hope, eh?

In Between the Sheets was first published forty years ago, and for some reason is about the only book by Ian McEwan that I have not read. Somehow I missed it in the early years and then there must have been a gap when it was not easily available, so when I saw an old second-hand copy I grabbed it with some delight.

I had forgotten how dark some of the early McEwan writing used to be, having become comfortable with his more recent novels. They early works had sinister elements and uncomfortable endings. The stories in this short collection of seven are no exception. A man cheating on two nurses is about to find himself undergoing an impromptu castration, or worse, at the hands of the women he has deceived. There are visions of a dystopian future where society has broken down, and there is a man who falls in love with a shop mannequin, seeing her as a perfect partner until her prolongued silences seem to point to her cheating on him behind his back.

I was pleasantly relieved that these stories still have the power to shock and surprise, even after forty years.