The Collected Stories

For more than four decades Reynolds Price has been one of Americas most distinguished writers with a career remarkable both for its virtuosity and for the variety of literary forms embraced. Though perhaps best known as a novelist and poet Price here likewise demonstrates his mastery of the short story. These fifty stories include two early collections -- The Names and Faces of Heroes and Permanent Errors -- as well as more than two dozen stories that are gathered only in The Collected Stories. In his introduction the author explains how at one point he wrote no stories for almost twenty years. But he writes 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. Indeed chances abound here in stories that will astonish even Prices most devoted readers as they travel through not only the authors native North Carolina but also Jerusalem the American Southwest Europe and Asia.