. . . be stone no more . . . - The Winter's Tale, V.iii.99 Stunning insights into Renaissance aesthetic theory appeared recently in an unlikely place: the final chapter of Stone by John Sallis, founding editor of Research in Phenomenology...

ANDREW LOOG OLDHAM. St. Martin's, $23.95 (400p) ISBN 0-312-26653-7 Oldham is and forever will be best known as the trendy hustler from mid-1960s swinging London who discovered the Rolling Stones and molded their bad-boy tendencies in his own image. After the Stones...

Alan Garner's stories, The Stone Book and Tom Fobble's Day, are not poems but they have the overtones, the power to stir and engage the imagination, which we expect from poetry…. The simplicity of Tom Fobble's Day is a matter of uncomplicated syntax and a direct, concrete vocabulary. At the most obvious level this suits a story of one winter day in which a boy whose sledge is Tom Fobbled [a ritual borrowing] and then broken, visits his grandfather, the local "whitesmith an...

The order in which the stories of Alan Garner's quartet appear may confuse those who like their genealogies well ordered. But the young should be encouraged to read them as soon as they appear. Like memories, they are reworked in the head after their impact as events. The Stone Book is still for me the foundation of a literary experience of great power. Tom Fobble's Day and Granny Reardun keep the clarity and precision, particularly of time, place and persons…. Garner has made his text ...

Expect a lot, and you won't be expecting too much, of The Stone Book by Alan Garner…. It is a miniature masterwork and, like all great miniatures, is staggering in what its limits contain…. [It] re-establishes the boundaries of what can be done in the pre-novel form, and it shows Garner to be totally in command of his art. The prose is assured, precisely right, without flaw; the story itself has an emotional poise that up till now has not been present in Garner's writing.