Katherine Anne Porter: Collected Stories and Other Writings (Library of America #186) (Hardcover)

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Editorial Reviews

Review

“Katherine Anne Porter’s stories have rightly had the highest reputation in America since they first appeared in the early Thirties. . . . Porter’s singularity as a writer is in her truthful explorations of a complete consciousness of life.”
—V. S. Pritchett

Product Description

Eudora Welty said that Katherine Anne Porter “writes stories with a power that stamps them to their very last detail on the memory.” Set in her native Texas and her beloved Mexico, prewar Nazi Germany and the gothic Old South, they are stories of love, outrage, betrayal, and spiritual reckoning that are severe but never cruel, and always exquisitely precise. They number fewer than thirty, but as Robert Penn Warren commented, “many are unsurpassed in modern fiction,” and when gathered in one volume in 1965 they won their author both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. The Library of America now reprints that landmark volume, The Collected Stories of Katherine Anne Porter, and pairs it with a completely new selection from Porter’s long-out-of-print short prose. Expanding the contents of her 1952 collection The Days Before to include both early journalism and major pieces from her final three decades, the prose works collected here are grouped in four parts: critical essays on writers she loved and learned from, including James, Cather, Lawrence, and Colette; personal essays and speeches on such topics as the craft of writing, her own work, women in myth and in history, and American politics; essays and reports on Mexican life, letters, and revolution; and two previously uncollected forays into autobiography.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 1100 pages
• Publisher: Library of America; Library of America edition (September 18, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1598530291
• ISBN-13: 978-1598530292
• Product Dimensions: 7.9 x 5 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #405,598 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Master of Short Fiction, September 18, 2008

By	R. M. Simmons "M. Simmons" (Mississippi) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Katherine Anne Porter's stories, as well as her novel "Ship of Fools," have never gone out of print. They've always been available in some edition or another, albeit mostly in paperback. So it's gratifying to see her stories finally grace the Library of America series, in a handsome new hardcover edition edited by her most recent biographer, Darlene Unrue. The bonus, of course, is the inclusion of nearly all of Porter's finest essays and personal and particular pieces. Most of these have been out of print for decades, and many are masterpieces in their own right. Also, two previously unpublished autobiographical sketches are included. Ms. Unrue has seleced a fine array of non-fiction pieces and provided invaluable notes at the end of the volume.

Reprinted is Porter's beautiful tribute to Willa Cather, as well as her famous caricature of Gertrude Stein. Both essays reveal as much about Porter herself, and her passionate convictions, as their intended subjects. Whether in praise or damnation, Porter's comments about literature, morality, politics, aesthetics, and the role of the artist in society are illuminating of their particular time and place. They are also timeless and thought provoking, even disturbing and downright jolting: in the Cather essay, Porter discusses the preoccupation with experimentation of early literary modernism, then deftly segues into the horrific medical experiments carried out by Nazi Germany. This is classic Porter--the limitless, unfettered human spirit she so admired, as personified by Willa Cather, juxtaposed with the sinister side of human nature. It is precisely these explorations that are the hallmarks of her fiction, and it's no wonder that critics and readers alike continue to marvel at the depths she was able to penetrate in relatively short space. In that aspect she is all but peerless.

Every line written by Katherine Anne Porter testifies to her striking originality. Porter's influences were diverse, but the final distillation of those influences resulted in a voice that is uniquely her own and bears no resemblance to any other master. And "master" she was, triumphantly so. Robert Penn Warren's assertion that her best work is unsurpassed in modern literature holds true as much today as when he first proffered the remark, nearly seventy years ago.

KAP's 1982 biographer, Joan Givner, complained that Porter's stories were being supplanted in anthologies by current favorites that were often inferior to Porter's work. Hopefully, this volume will help rectify what Givner rightly called "an error in judgment." Personal tastes may vary, but no one can objectively say that any other short story master surpassed Katherine Anne Porter. Only the absolutely finest story writers, past and present, are her equals. The 1,100 pages of this Library of America edition--released on the 28th anniversary of Porter's death--amount to a literary treasure. In fact, a national treasure.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Porter, November 23, 2008

By	A. Johnson (San Francisco) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

I love Katherine Anne Porter anyway but this collection is definitive. I had read her fiction before but this collection includes her book reviews and her thoughts about other writers and how they influenced her. While I don't worry about where writers get their ideas or styles, her insights into literature are always very interesting.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Sublime storytelling that reveals a lost sun in the heavens of fiction., June 22, 2009

By	Donald A. Newlove (Greenwich Village) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This is Library of America at its best, a volume wonderful just to hold as you read. I'd read Porter's lone novel "Ship of Fools" thirty or forty years ago but was not prepared for the sharp subliminal eye she brings to every sentence of her stories and short novels. Until I look it over again, I must call "Ship of Fools" a far lesser work than the glories set forth here. In some stories I thought at first that Porter'd sunk to mere storytelling, but by story's end found myself wonderstruck. She has no commonplaces of speech or description, never writes a sentence just for information--it will have color or tone or some purpose beyond information. For example, the very amusing, brilliant story "A Day's Work" opens with the sound of rats scrambling inside a wall, an apt image for poverty-stricken Irish New Yorkers during the seventh year of the Depression--although the so-called rats turn out to be a dumbwaiter lifting groceries from below to an upstairs apartment, while this story's comic realism later swerves into time-gaps of foot-slipping rock-solid drunkenness. Most of these stories were written in the nineteen-twenties and thirties, long before the arrival of magical realism from Garcia-Marquez, but they often have a magical effect that sinks you so deep into the events and consciousness of the characters that you find yourself carried by some underground river from event to unheralded event. When you begin each story it's often hard to believe that this is the same writer of the earlier stories of hers you've just read. So it's pointless to choose some single story as my favorite--they all differ in genre, unless you think of Porter's magnifying eye and depth of sensibiity as a genre unto itself--but for me her "Pale Horse, Pale Rider" remains matchless even by her (and outshines Tolstoy's short novel "The Death of Ivan Illych"), which is not to say that other stories herein don't have passages of power equal to "Pale Horse, Pale Rider". But if you are a writer yourself--and no matter how skilled--this story (and this volume) can nonetheless leave you skinless with envy.