Smut from Alan Bennett

Tomorrow is the U.S. onsale for Alan Bennett's pair of misnamed, gay-inclusive novellas, Smut. If British critics found the book a bit brief, they were nevertheless enchanted by the two stories, "The Shielding of Mrs. Forbes" and "The Greening of Mrs. Donaldson." As the Times reminds you, "Nobody does a finer old gorgon than Alan Bennett." The Guardian: "Smut offers plenty of Bennett's trademark pleasures... consistently amusing and full of witty turns of phrase." The Independent: "Amusingly peculiar... tender and comic... joyous anarchism... It is good, old-fashioned British humour with the lightest of subversive twists." The Financial Times: "Artfully entertaining... The stories have a dark, knowing shrewdness about erotic mischief, young and old."

Michael Lowenthal cited the twin tales in Smut in Thebes' queer lit poll: "one about a closeted gay man’s double life, and the other (even better) about a widowed landlady who gets involved with her two young tenants in a deliciously surprising way."

Click to hear Bennett reading excerpts from his diary for the London Review of Books.