"I walked to the public library. I knew in advance it would be closed but I prefer to sit on the steps outside. I sat there now, in a shrinking patch of shade." One line — "I sat there now, in a shrinking patch of shade" — in the beginning of a disgusting, terrible story, a line I love with all my heart for its beautiful artistic brilliance. McEwan is a lot of things in these stories, he writes with emotion and feeling, clarity, energy, ambition, technique, and of course, the grotesque. My favorites were 'Homemade' and 'Disguises'. I think those are the peak examples of this style: shocking and graceful. I'm not really interested in his novels, don't know why. Maybe someday I will. This is the stuff that should get published. Not 'Butterflies', but everything else is pretty glorious as far as literary short stories go. 28, I think, when it was published. He called these early stories "stylistic experiments" but honestly, I think he means, "out-there" or "radical", I'm not sure it does them justice to just sort of wave off by implying real artistic maturity was still to come; it's almost as if the early period of your artistic life can be by far the most euphoric, can establish by far the most unvarnished emotions and dead niceties.