Elizabeth Hardwick was one of America's great postwar women of letters, celebrat
ed as a novelist and as an essayist. Until now, however, her slim but remarkable
achievement as a writer of short stories has remained largely hidden, with her
work tucked away in the pages of the periodicals--such as "Partisan Review, The
New Yorker," and "The New York Review of Books"--in which it originally appeared
. This first collection of Hardwick's short fiction reveals her brilliance as a
stylist and as an observer of contemporary life. A young woman returns from New
York to her childhood Kentucky home and discovers the world of difference within
her. A girl's boyfriend is not quite good enough, his "silvery eyes, light and
cool, revealing nothing except pure possibility, like a coin in hand." A magazin
e editor's life falls strangely to pieces after she loses both her husband and h
er job. Individual lives and the life of New York, the setting or backdrop for m
ost of these stories, are strikingly and memorably depicted in Hardwick's beauti
ful and razor-sharp prose.
