The Matisse Stories

ALSO BY A. S. BYATT

POSSESSIONWinner of England’s Booker Prize and a literary sensation, Possession is both an exhilarating intellectual mystery and a triumphant love story of a pair of young scholars researching the lives of two Victorian poets.

Fiction/Literature/0-679-73590-9

ANGELS & INSECTS

Two Novellas

In “Morpho Eugenia,” a shipwrecked naturalist is rescued by a family whose clandestine passions come to seem as inscrutable as the behavior of insects. In “The Conjugial Angel,” a circle of fictional mediums finds itself haunted by the ghost of a historical personage.

Fiction/Literature/0-679-75134-3

PASSIONS OF THE MIND

Thoughtfully and stylishly, A. S. Byatt considers the parallels between George Eliot and Willa Cather; Robert Browning’s spiritual malaise and the mythic strands in the novels of Saul Bellow and Iris Murdoch; and other matters of art and intellect both past and present.

Literary Criticism/Literature/0-679-73678-6THE GAMEA story of two sisters, Cassandra and Julia, once close, but now hostile strangers. Confronted by a man from their past, who they once both loved and suffered over, they struggle with each other toward a denouement that is both shocking and as inevitable as a classical tragedy.

FÎction/Literature/0-679-74256-5

SUGAR AND OTHER STORIES

This dazzling collection of short fiction explores the fragile ties between generations, the dizzying abyss of loss, and the elaborate memories we construct against it.

Fiction/Literature/0-679-74227-1

THE VIRGIN IN THE GARDEN

A wonderfully erudite entertainment about a brilliant and eccentric family, in which enlightenment and sexuality, Elizabethan drama and contemporary comedy, intersect richly and unpredictably.

Fiction/Literature/0-679-73829-0Available at your local bookstore, or call toll-free to order:

1-800-793-2665 (credit cards only).

FIRST VINTAGE INTERNATIONAL EDITION, APRIL 1996

Copyright © 1993 by A. S. Byatt

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

Grateful acknowledgment is made to Artists Rights Society (ARS),

New York, for permission to reprint the following three black-and-white line drawings by Henri Matisse : La Chevelure, Nymphe et faune, and L’Artiste et le modèle reflétés dans le miroir. Copyright © 1995

Succession H. Matisse, Paris/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

The Library of Congress has cataloged the Random House edition as follows:

Byatt, A. S. (Antonia Susan)

The Matisse stories/A. S. Byatt

p. cm.

eISBN: 978-0-307-48804-6

1. Matisse, Henri, 1869-1954. I. Title.

PR6052.Y2M37 1993

823′.914—dc20 94-46131

Random House Web address: http://www.randomhouse.com/

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