Generous, canny and human

The collected stories of colette (Vintage, £ 4.55) selects a hundred short stories by one of France’s most outstanding writers, the creator of Gigi, Claudine and Chéri. Colette was born in 1873 and educated at a local village school. She was brought to Paris by her first husband, who would lock her up in her room to force her to write her first novels, which were an instant success. She then left him and started working for the popular stage. Chéri was published in 1920, and Colette went on to produce a huge and varied body of writing. She was the first woman president of the Académie Goncourt and was given a state funeral after her death in 1954. Colette’s advice to those who wanted to write was simply, “Look for a long time at what pleases you, and longer still at what pains you.” This is a delightful and absorbing collection, beautifully translated by an eminent panel of writers. Robert Phelps’s short introduction is a model of its kind, conveying the essence of Colette’s “classically trim art of storytelling” and her “canny, profoundly generous knowledge of all-too-human nature for which her name has become virtually a synonym”.

Soul coaching (Rider, £ 3.95) by Denise Linn is subtitled “28 Days to Discover the Real You” and offers a four-week programme of in-depth clearing and cleansing of your mental, emotional, physical and spiritual lives. It is structured on the model of the Four Elements. You will be taught to identify your Energy Zappers in the Water Week, and the Fire Week will ignite your enthusiasm and excitement. The point of it all is that you must love yourself.

Anthology of contemporary poetry from the northeast (NEHU, Rs 230) edited by Kynpham Sing Nongkynrih and Robin S. Ngangom is an excellent anthology of poems from Arunachal Pradesh, Assam, Manipur, Meghalaya, Mizoram, Nagaland and Tripura. The quality of the poetry is consistently high, the translations careful and crisp, and the editing perfect, but unobtrusive. This collection transcends the regionalism of the title, even as it captures the wide range of voices that make up the “North-east’s” unique modernity. “The uneasy coexistence of paradoxical worlds such as folk and the westernized, virgin forests and car-choked streets, ethnic cleansers and the parasites of democracy, ancestral values and flagrant corruption, resurgent nativism and the sensitive outsider’s predicament, make this picturesque region especially vulnerable to tragedy” (from the editor’s note).