Customer Reviews

Selected Short Stories Wm. Dean Howells

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It's hard to believe that Howells was a contemporary of Mark Twain. They seem to belong to different centuries: Twain to ours and Howells to Abraham Lincoln's. Howell's voice sounds necessarily a bit strange to a modern reader, but that strangeness gives him a special power.

He is inclined to narrate things from a distance. Even the agonies of a woman who has lost her lover in a war are told at a remove. In extreme cases, the narrator is telling the story as it was told by someone else who is relating events in the past. This style costs some immediacy, but it also keeps us from being totally distracted by personality. We don't root for these protagonists, but we listen to them.

And these are stories that are meant to get our ears. They demand our attention by their lack of polemic and the graceful nature of the narrative. Howells is a master.

Lynn Hoffman

This is a good book. Please buy it! (Christmas Every Day is good as a read-aloud for children)