Dylan Thomas: Collected Stories ed. Walford Davies (Phoenix, £6.99 in UK)

Thomas's short fiction is an underrated and relatively little-known aspect of his writings, apart from the collection entitled…

Thomas's short fiction is an underrated and relatively little-known aspect of his writings, apart from the collection entitled Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog. He was a rather inconsistent artist in prose - verse was always his primary vocation, and the tangles of his private life and struggle for a living made him turn out a number of stories which he frankly admitted were pot-boilers. Nevertheless he wrote some masterpieces in the genre, particularly those dealing with childhood or boyhood, Wales, and various comic themes (humour was always one of his strong points). This selection includes the Portrait stories, the fragment Adventures in the Skin Trade, and numerous others, many of which are unfamiliar.