Born in New Zealand in 1888, Kathering Mansfield Beauchamp was primarily a writer of short stories. published Prelude and The Garden Party and Other Stories before her premature death from TB in 1923. One more book (Something Childish) and her journal and letters were published posthumously. Ali Smith was born in Inverness in 1962. Her first novel, Like, was published to critical acclaim in 1997. Among her other works, Other Stories and Other Stories (1999), Hotel World (2001), The Whole Story and Other Stories (2003) and The Accidental (2004), which won the 2005 Whitbread Novel Award. Ali Smith lives in Cambridge.

Katherine Mansfield's clear, sparkling short stories revolutionised the genre, and this collection represents the whole range of her writing. Moving, resonant, full of light and colour, they span short studies to longer tales, encompassing her three major volumes, Bliss, The Garden Party and In a German Pension, plus fifteen tantalising fragments of unfinished stories published after her death - including 'Honesty', an intriguing tale of two bachelors, and 'The Doves' Nest', an exquisite story of a widowed mother and her daughter on the Riviera who receive a mysterious gentleman caller. Observing apparently trivial incidents to creative sensitive and quietly devastating revelation of her characters' inner lives, these deceptively simple stories confirm Mansfield's status as a pioneering Modernist writer.

In her new introduction to this edition Ali Smith discusses the intensity of Katherine Mansfield's life and writing, and her radical influence on English fiction.