The Collected Stories of Reynolds Price (Paperback)

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Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

includes The Names and Faces of Heroes and Permanent Errors , as well as several stories not previously collected.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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much earlier collections ( The Names and Faces of Heros , LJ 6/15/63, and Permanent Errors , LJ 8/70), plus a number of unpublished or uncollected stories from later years.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. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 640 pages
• Publisher: Scribner (February 3, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0743244990
• ISBN-13: 978-0743244992
• Product Dimensions: 8 x 5.3 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #1,505,823 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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2 of 2 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

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.