Literary Fiction · MelancholicThirty stories of people who are far from home
The Collected Stories of Jean Stafford
Thirty stories by Jean Stafford, grouped by place
The collection brings together thirty stories, including The Interior Castle, In the Zoo, Bad Characters and Children Are Bored on Sunday. They come from her two earlier books and from pieces that were never collected. Stafford arranged them by locale, and in her author's note she says that most of her characters are away from home and probably homesick, but will not return.
More about this book
Who
A wide range of narrators and characters, many of them lonely or out of place and away from home.
World
The stories are grouped by place. Their titles are borrowed from Mark Twain and Henry James.
What makes it different
It won the 1970 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. The 463-page edition from Farrar, Straus & Giroux gathers thirty stories, but fourteen of Stafford's stories remain uncollected.
Feel
Polished and precise, a book to read a story at a time.
Page count and cover shown for: Selected edition