The Mannheim Exit

The author's fourth collection of stories. It comprises the novella THE MANNHEIM EXIT - 'Inclined by nature to inertia and prevarication, lacking notable personal ambition-whether for advancement, affluence, or office-disliking change and accepting it only when imposed on him from without-an occasional, unavoidable evil-preferring in all things the familiar and the well-tried, [Richard Carteris asked] of life no more than that the future should be a prolongation of the past via an uneventful present . . .' A university lecturer involves himself in an affair that threatens to destroy utterly the settled pattern of his existence - and three shorter stories: THE SILENCE OF JOSEPH B - A lover of silence evolves a strategy for survival in a world of intolerable noise; TRANSITION - A young man is disturbed by a glamorous Doppelgänger; and THE SLIDING DOORS - A narrator's acrimonious dispute with his author radically transforms the fate of the characters.