Selected stories / Shirley Ann Grau ; with a foreword by Robert Phillips.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Grau, Shirley Ann.

Contributor:

Gotham Book Mart Collection (University of Pennsylvania)

Standardized Title:

Short stories. Selections

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Southern States--Social life and customs--Fiction.

Southern States.

Manners and customs.

Genre:

Fiction.

Penn Provenance:

Gotham Book Mart (former owner) (Gotham Book Mart Collection copy)

Physical Description:

x, 274 pages ; 24 cm

Place of Publication:

Baton Rouge : Louisiana State University Press, [2003]

Summary:

This magnificent summation of the short stories of Shirley Ann Grau, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for her novel The Keepers of the House, is a long overdue but joyfully welcome volume that gathers together eighteen gems ranking with the finest of Eudora Welty and Flannery O'Connor. Included are the mysterious, fable-like title piece from her widely acclaimed first collection, The Black Prince and Other Stories; dazzlingly varied tales from The Wind Shifting West; and quietly assured stories from her most recent collection, Nine Women, illuminating the psyches of female characters young and old, rich and poor, plain and beautiful. Very much a southern writer, especially in her empathic portrayal of black and white relations, Grau possesses a range representing a master course in the craft of this most demanding art form. her reader's banquet offers character sketches of Chekovian poignance and insight, a hilarious love story, excursions into the gothic and hauntingly apocalyptic, the elegiac and experimental, and stories that feel like compressed novels in their lapidary polish, depth, and emotional weight. Shirley Ann Grau belongs in the company of the great southern short story writers, and the author's own choices of her best work remind readers of the unmatched capacity of the brief fictional form to depict character epiphany and such timeless themes as redemption and rebirth, the struggle between power and love, and the persistence of the past. Grau's descriptive skills and compassion bring us back into the familiars of the human heart and those strange and varied places we call -- in a word that figures mightily in her work -- "home."

Contents:

Flight

The beginning

The black prince

The patriarch

Letting go

The wind shifting west

The man outside

Sea change

Housekeeper

The lovely April

Homecoming

One summer

Hunter

Home

Summer shore

Widow's walk

Three

The last gas station.

Local Notes:

Gotham Book Mart Collection copy has dustjacket retained.

ISBN:

080712883X

OCLC:

51810793