Top-flight entry in the Mammoth Book of . . . series, which are always valuable and fun, but this one takes the cake and has a number of modern classic entries that idle readers may well never have heard of but should not miss. This is not junk food, but rather a truly distinguished table dhte of elegant fare and suave storytelling. Standing out strongly against the strong standouts is poet Stevie Smith's anything-goes ``Is There Lire Beyond the Gravy?,'' in which a teacher is untimely ripped from her grave by her dead relatives during the London blitz and sent back to work in a classroom where students fly in the window and the dead must continue to look on the bright side of things. Henry James's ``The Third Person,'' written in the same English village house where he wrote ``The Turn of the Screw,'' creates a seminal ghost whose new qualities are echoed throughout this collection.
