Collected Stories of Reynolds Price [Hardcover]

Reynolds Price (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 21, 1993

For over three decades, Reynolds Price has been one of America's most distinguished writers, in a career that has been remarkable both for its virtuosity and for the variety of literary forms he has embraced. Now he shows himself as much a master of the story as he is of the novel, in a volume that presents fifty stories, including two early collections - The Names and Faces of Heroes and Permanent Errors - as well as more than two dozen new stories that have never been gathered together before. In his introduction, Mr. Price explains how, after the publication of his first two collections, he wrote no new stories for almost twenty years. "But once I needed - for unknown reasons in a new and radically altered life - to return to the story, it opened before me like a new chance...A collection like this then, " he adds, ."..will show a writer's pre-occupations in ways the novel severely rations (novels are partly made for that purpose - the release from self, long flights through the Other). John Keats's assertion that 'the excellence of every Art is its intensity' has served as a license and standard for me. From the start my stories were driven by heat - passion and mystery, often passion for the mystery I've found in particular rooms and spaces and the people they threaten or shelter - and my general aim is the transfer of a spell of keen witness, perceived by the reader as warranted in character and act." There is, indeed, much for the reader to "witness" here of passion and mystery, of character and act. And the variety of stories - many of them set in Reynolds Price's native North Carolina, but a surprising number set in distant parts: Jerusalem in "An Early Christmas, " the American Southwest in "Walking Lessons, " and a number in Europe - will astonish even his most devoted readers. In short, The Collected Stories of Reynolds Price is as deeply rewarding a book as any he has yet published.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Indisputably one of our most masterly writers, Price ( Kate Vaiden ; Blue Calhoun ) bends to no literary fashion; he writes about unsung, ordinary people, lifting their lives out of anonymity. Of the 50 stories in this third collection of his short fiction, half are newly gathered; the rest come from collections published in 1963 and 1970. Many of the characters in these magical, quietly revelatory, death-obsessed tales are transformed by chance encounters, in settings that include Price's native south but also range throughout the world. "Walking Lessons" concerns a college teacher who comes to terms with his wife's suicide after assisting a dying Navajo woman on her reservation. In "An Early Christmas," a divorced American painter, a lapsed Catholic, sets off to attend Christmas mass in Bethlehem, where he finds a fresh perspective on his life and art through meetings with Palestinian Arabs in the occupied West Bank. The same generosity of spirit and penetrating insight that mark Price's novels infuse these unsparingly honest narratives. His characters grope almost blindly toward redemption, their earned epiphanies lifting them slightly closer to "the mind of God." Everywhere they stumble upon the abyss, whether as a tourist at the Dachau concentration camp ("A Fool's Education"); a man who kidnaps his granddaughter ("Toward Home"); or the (perhaps autobiographical) survivor of four spinal surgery operations steeled by the memory of a long dead cousin ("The Golden Child.") In nearly every story, Price's unflinching celebrations of life and death cut to the bone.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

The 50 stories in this massive volume include works from two much earlier collections ( The Names and Faces of Heros , LJ 6/15/63, and Permanent Errors , LJ 8/70), plus a number of unpublished or uncollected stories from later years. The author explains in a preface that for 20 years he concentrated on novels, including the award-winning Kate Vaiden ( LJ 12/86). The stories have a strong autobiographical lilt, depicting childhood in North Carolina and family relationships. Some of the family stories are dark and violent; in "Son," for instance, an abusive father tries to explain his failure as a parent to his son. Others are more wistfully nostalgic: "Uncle Grant" recalls the itinerant old black man who did yard work for a boy's family and was, for a time, his closest companion. All in all, a significant collection of American short fiction.
- Ann H. Fisher, Radford P.L., Va.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 640 pages
• Publisher: Scribner; 1ST edition (June 21, 1993)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0689121474
• ISBN-13: 978-0689121470
• Product Dimensions: 9.6 x 6.4 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,948,596 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Reynolds Price was born in Macon, North Carolina in 1933. Educated at Duke University and, as a Rhodes Scholar, at Merton College, Oxford University, he has taught at Duke since 1958 and is now James B. Duke Professor of English.

His first short stories, and many later ones, are published in his Collected Stories. A Long and Happy Life was published in 1962 and won the William Faulkner Award for a best first novel. Kate Vaiden was published in 1986 and won the National Book Critics Circle Award. The Good Priest's Son in 2005 was his fourteenth novel. Among his thirty-seven volumes are further collections of fiction, poetry, plays, essays, and translations. Price is a member of both the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and his work has been translated into seventeen languages.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Good, October 13, 2008

By 

Cosmoetica "cosmoeticadotcom" (New York, USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Collected Stories of Reynolds Price (Paperback)

While reading Reynolds Price's The Collected Stories (culled from his two prior collections- The Names and Faces of Heroes and Permanent Errors- as well as new tales) it occurred to me that he was chiefly a proponent of the idea that it is better to have an ambition to excel rather than an ambition to acquire. Almost all of Price's protagonists seek to better themselves in the face of death, hardship, ignominy, or the like, yet few subscribe to the materialism that plagues his native land. Thus, he seems to come from an older time when this was the rule- not the exception, even though he was born in 1933, well into the Twentieth Century. In a sense, the best of his short stories, which is the bulk of the thirty-nine herein collected, are both a paean to that ideal, as well as an exemplary illustration of the classic difference between which sort of writing dominates a writer's mind- the intellectual and analytical, or the emotional and spiritual. Writers such as Richard Ford and William Trevor (whose Collected Stories I read alternating with Price's) are clearly in the former camp. They look at things, characters, and situations intently, placing emphasis on such to the point that often incisive soliloquies break out. Writers like Monica Wood or Edward P. Jones are clearly emotional writers foremost. This does not mean their stories lack intellect, just as Trevor's, nor Ford's, lack emotion, simply that emotion is the primal reason for their storytelling. Reynolds Price sits almost squarely on the fence between those two camps. He is a wonderfully evocative writer about the body, memory, death, and emotion, yet he can discourse with the best of them- and not in the pseudo-babbling of Postmodernists like a David Foster Wallace or Rick Moody, who cannot even masturbate well, much less carry a narrative. That said, his work might have the most enduring qualities of all the aforementioned writers.

The odd thing is that I first knew him as a bad poet- one whose early work showed potential, but whose later verse became stale and academic- as it now occupies a place on my shelf for prosists-cum-poetasters like John Updike, Evan S. Connell, Tennessee Williams, Eugene O'Neill, Raymond Carver, Edward Abbey, and Loren Eiseley. What amazes me is how people who are utterly devoid of originality and music in poetry can be so masterful in prose. The difference may be sharpest with Price. And the most clear-cut schism may be with a series of small prose pieces that are really mood pieces, and, as such, are really more accurately proems- and the equal of the best of a Georg Trakl or Rainer Maria Rilke. In fact, I would have put these pieces in with his Collected Poems, not Collected Stories....One of the best things about this Collected Stories is that it is a true book, not merely a compendium. The stories are put in a good order, with short tales allowing breathing space for the longer, richer tales. Too often, in de facto Best Of collections, the tales are poorly selected, and then put in seemingly random order. This book has purpose to it, and because of its form one cannot tell where the older and newer stories begin nor end. Yet, there is no schism, which is a tribute to Price's decades-long excellence. In the book's Introduction Price even states: `....all of them stand in a new order- one which attempts an alternation of voices, echoes, lengths and concerns that would prove unlikely if I held to the order of the prior volumes or set the stories by date of completion.' It's a smart choice, one too few writers and editors seem to understand, which also separates Price from lesser writers, and hurls him on toward something like greatness.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Some brilliant; some just plain disturbing, February 22, 2011

By 

Karen - See all my reviews

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This review is from: Collected Stories of Reynolds Price (Kindle Edition)

I admit I haven't finished all the stories yet. I love Price's way with words and images. Many of the stories are brilliant in his masterful telling--he really evokes the people, places, and feelings for the reader. I guess that's why the really disturbing stories are so very disturbing. I stopped reading this book at night. That said, I do recommend the book--but with fair warning. Parts of it might trouble your mind and soul. Clearly, it's meant to do so and that's not necessarily bad. It's just not easy.