Page "First Love, Last Rites" Paragraph 13

McEwan's collection was well received by critics.

In the Dictionary of Literary Biography, John Fletcher explained, " Such writing would be merely sensational if it were not, like Kafka's, pointed, so accurate, so incapable indeed of being appalled.

In contemporary writing one has to turn to French literature to encounter a similar contrast between the elegance of the language and the disturbing quality of the material ; in writing in English McEwan is wholly unique.

" Critic Robert Towers described McEwan's England in The New York Review of Books as a " flat, rubble-strewn wasteland, populated by freaks and monsters, most of them articulate enough to tell their own stories with mesmerizing narrative power and an unfaltering instinct for the perfect, sickening detail "; Towers called the collection " possibly the most brilliantly perverse and sinister batch of short stories to come out of England since Angus Wilson's The Wrong Set.