SOURCE: Connolly, Cressida. “An Explosion of Truth.” Spectator 280, no. 8844 (7 February 1998): 36.

In the following review, Connolly offers a positive assessment of Bear and His Daughter, noting the critical trend to compare Stone's writing to that of Ernest Hemingway and Raymond Carver.

This is not a book [Bear and His Daughter] for the squeamish. There are only seven short stories in the collection, but these few tales describe an array of horrors worthy of Greek tragedy: incest, adultery and patricide all put in an appearance. One story features aborted foetuses. Elsewhere, small children perish by falling through thin ice on a skating expedition; a toddler whines in a grubby cot, unheeded by her drug-addicted parents; people drown. Even landscape is merciless, whether it's the suffocating ‘smell of thick-fleshed green things’ in a jungle, or the bleak Reno highway where ‘a sad wind blew across the creosote plain’. There is no...