The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty by Eudora Welty

The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty Reviews

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  Teresa

  A Curtain of Green certainly doesn't read like the first stories of a new writer Except for a few in anthologies like the great Why I Live at the PO and Death of a Traveling Salesman both included here this is my first time reading her short stories and I can't believe it took me this long to get to her May 10 2008The Wide Net is another wonderful collection Each story except one which is set in a bar in New Orleans is set in and around the Natchez Trace including a couple of very interesting ones with historical figures as characters Aaron Burr in one Audubon in another as well as real lesser knowns and another possibly my favorite that uses Greek mythological elements and a Greek chorus for the contemporary story of the town ueen a Hera like harridan The final story is heartbreaking July 23 2011Dense and allusive The Golden Apples is a tour de force a short story cycle that could be discussed endlessly with its references to mythology folklore the nature of time and gender escaping time and gender and much Perhaps I wasn't always sure of what Welty was getting at when I was in the midst of a story but by story's end I marveled at the brilliance July 6 2012Though maybe not the masterpiece the previous collection is The Bride of Innisfallen is also the work of a master storyteller The themes that bind this collection are perhaps subtle but they are there and the style of many of the stories is uite modern Welty's way with dialogue and turns of phrase is impeccable July 23 2012The two 'uncollected stories' written in the early 60's that end this volume say much than they might seem to say and are further evidence of Welty's keen eye now trained on the changing times
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  WILLIAM2

  Finished Welty's first collection A Curtain of Green and Other Stories published in 1941 Highly recommended My favorite stories include Keela the Outcast Indian Maiden A Curtain of Green Old Mr Marblehall and Why I Live at the PO Of the 17 stories here the only one that doesn't seem to work is Powerhouse perhaps because of all the dialogue rendered in dialect Everything else has held up remarkably wellNow reading the collection A Wide Net Finished the first two tales First Love and A Wide Net Rich emotionally complex stories that merit multiple readings Still reading
• 
  Dan

  The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty won the 1982 National Book Award There are forty two short stories in this lengthy 622 page book I enjoyed the earlier stories in the book but not many of the later ones Welty’s stories feel uite dated reading some seventy years later Here are some of the ones I liked 1 Why I Live at the Post Office Sister alienates family by making too many assumptions but is able to get the family on her side by telling blatant lies and manipulating others2 Old Mr Marblehall He lives a double life with a son by each wife The sons even look alike The author dreams of how one day Marblehall’s secret will be exposed Maybe one of his young sons will follow their dad to the other house3 Flowers for Marjorie Creepy story Man kills pregnant wife4 The Wide Net Husband thinks young pregnant wife has drowned herself He spends all day dragging the river to find her body She was just hiding the whole time seeking attention5 Livvie Husband is old and sickly and dying Livvie brings a young man home who is her age They watch the old man die and begin dancing35 stars I didn’t love these stories as much as I anticipated since I previously read Welty’s novel called The Optimist’s Daughter and enjoyed it
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  ·Karen·

  The richness of such talent resists a summing up Maureen Howard might be a likely candidate for a gold medal in stating the patently obvious for her blurb on the back of this collection After all there are forty one stories here written over a time span of around thirty years naturally they defy summing up duh But I'm being uncharitable towards Ms Howard any uote on the back of a book takes the uotee's words out of context And in fact I'm twisting what she says as she never claims that the stories resist summary but rather that Welty's talent cannot be pigeon holed How right The range of these stories is truly remarkable not just the diversity of plot character voice but also of genre which goes from high comedy in a delight such as Why I live at the PO to poignant desolation in Death of a Traveling Salesman from whimsical pastiche in Asphodel to gritty social realism in the final two stories She's not a writer that can be summed up it's true If there is a unifying element in these magnificent stories then it might be found in the obliue indirect style Some might even be called mystifying Few will allow the reader to get inside a character follow their thoughts and feel with and for them Welty chooses to keep us always slightly at a distance always on guard watching our backs Perspective fades and shimmers the surface dissolves into liuid depths beneath;often it's not clear if this is fantasy or the 'real' world workaday or myth fairy tale or the family next door Maybe that's how to sum up Ms Welty she never has the arrogance to believe that she knows She observes she imagines she invents But the essential mystery remains
• 
  Meredith Holley

  I was introduced to this book by a smooth talking cool British professor who mentioned it was his favorite collection of short stories? Book? It’s difficult to remember now That was years ago And it wasn’t the first time I had heard of the collection I think in college I even recorded a friend reading Why I live at the PO in a funny voice for a theater class Or maybe just selections from the story So anyway I was on a short story reading kick and after loving Cather’s and Hemingway’s and Katherine Mansfield’s I thought I would give these a chance At first we really hit it off The stories in the first collection A Curtain of Green are really tight with surprise endings and good dialog Then as I got to know Welty better it became obvious that maybe she was a friend who was fun to party with but not someone with whom I’d want to talk about anything important Because I had to start to ask myself if she wasn’t kind of racist I generally still liked The Wide Net especially the title story That was one of my favorites in the whole book It wasn’t until The Golden Apples though that I realized Welty is boring And then by The Bride of the Innisfallen Welty had become just a crazy old bitty calling to ramble nonsensically about some kids holding hands on a cruise ship Then there is a surprise uber racist ending of a couple of unpublished storiesThe one story in The Golden Apples that is worth reading is Moon Lake It starts out slow like a lot of hers do but it’s worth it for the way it ends Otherwise I would skip the last two collections entirely The first two are still worth reading though Well maybe just the first one and the title story of the secondIt took me about three years to read this collection of short stories so I feel like I should be able to write something profound about it I have been reading this book since I first started my goodreads account and finishing it is something of a milestone Rather than feeling celebratory though I feel like I just don’t ever want to think about it again One reviewer wrote of The Golden Apples “This book has been an albatross around my neck all freaking summer” I’d like to echo that sentiment for the entire collection I’ve been a lot better about it since I started this book reporting business but usually I’m pretty stubborn about finishing books even if I don’t like them This is a good example of that I should have just uit when it started going bad because it did not ever get better Stupid smooth talking Brits Stupid southern women writers
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  Lowry

  The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty contains all the best of her life's work as a writer Welty was not temperamentally a novelist though her short novel The Optimist's Daughter is totally worth reading The short story was the right form for her This book besides containing within it The Golden Apples see my separate review holds other masterpieces that will repay many re readings Her work gets deeper and deeper as you contemplate it Here are some stories I particularly hope people will tryA Piece of NewsThe Hitch HikersA Curtain of GreenDeath of a Traveling SalesmanPowerhouseThe Wide NetThe WindsAt the LandingNo Place for You My LoveThe Burning if this and At the Landing don't dispel the image of Eudora Welty as the harmless little Southern lady nothing ever willThe Bride of the InnisfallenLadies in SpringWhere Is the Voice Coming From?The Demonstrators
• 
  Sue

  A wonderful awe inspiring story collection that spans Welty's career Reading it with friends as I've done here has added to my enjoyment of the stories themselves and to my knowledge of Welty and understanding of the influences behind her writingAs to what are my favorite? Hmmm Of course there is Why I Live at the PO Then there is the whole book The Golden Apple I recall scenes from The Death of a Traveling Salesman There are too many And I know I will be dipping into this book in the future to sample these stories again at my leisure and will have to say about favorites then tooThank you to Teresa Mikki Karen and Cynthia at the end for making this such a great reading experience
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  Ronald Morton

  I have been told both in approval and in accusation that I seem to love all my characters What I do in writing of any character is to try to enter into the mind heart and skin of a human being who is not myself Whether this happens to be a man or a woman old or young with skin black or white the primary challenge lies in making the jump itself It is the act of a writer’s imagination that I set most high Eudora Welty This collection covers 25 years the entirety of Eudora Welty's short story writing It is arranged chronologically sectionally separated into the original collections as they were publishedIt is apparent from the start the talent and voice that Welty brought to the short story She is firmly entrenched in the southern literary tradition and brings to it a lightness of prose and a gentleness of regard that closely embraces the characters she is writing This embrace is provided regardless of worth there are couples in love and adulterers; there are weddings to be had and separations to follow; there is tenderness and there is murder; there are caresses and there are abuses That's not to say that all are treated eually but it is to say that Welty presents each scene in a light that demands restraint if not understanding on the part of the readerAnd her skill grows throughout the collection The early stories are full of life but short in a way that shows a writer still feeling out her talents afraid to hold a note too long less the bend of the string give away the strain As the collection progresses this hesitancy disappears and stories stretch out into multi sectioned affairs and the characters are allowed room to grow and thriveAll this stated there was no single story in here that truly blew me away; just a steady growth and presentation of exceptional talent Welty was undeniably an incredible writer but I was surprised having read all of her novels last week that a writer so known for her short fiction would have presented some of her best prose in the longer form the actual prose of Delta Wedding is stronger than mostly anything here in spite of its flaws What this collection does just as reading all of her early novels did is highlight the triumph of her last work The Optimists' Daughter and continue to frame how it combined all of the elements that made Welty such a talent and why her regard is earned and deserved
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  Tom

  Having cut my literary teeth on Flannery O'Connor I pshawed Miss Eudora whenever she entered the conversation regarding short story writers assuming without having actually read her mind you that she wrote polite little stories of Southern manners that didn't belong on the same shelf with Flannery I freely admit now that attitude belonged to an ignoramus of embarrassingly shallow depths It took just one story The Petrified Man to straighten me out In fact her entire first collection A Curtain of Green is as tough as anything Hemingway produced in his stories and I dare say she has range that Hemingway and O'Connor who can seem a trifle deterministic and predictable over the course of several stories in comparison Keela the Outcast Indian Maiden; The Hitch Hikers which makes nice companion with O'Connor's A Good Man is Hard to Find A Curtain of Green Clytie and Powerhouse have a wry toughness and compassion that I've not encountered elsewhere on the other hand Why I Live at the PO and A Worn Path stories that get anthologized ad nauseum are lesser works in my opinion Over the course of her career Welty's stories become lyrical and ambiguous and while I have favorites from all points of her output nothing can top one of her final stories No Place for You My Love in probing the mysteries that govern the human heart It ranks up there with Melville's Barleby the Scrivener Hemingway's Big Two Hearted River O'Connor's A Good Man is Hard to Find and Baldwin's Sonny's Blues as the one of the greatest of American short stories This entire collection confirms Borges' statement that Unlike the novel the short story may be for all purposes essential
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  Cheryl

  In some of her stories Welty’s adeptness at getting you into a character’s frame of mind while also giving you backstory through dialogue is spellbinding Papa Daddy woke up with this horrible yell and right there without moving an inch he tried to turn Uncle Rondo against me I heard every word he said Oh he told Uncle Rondo I didn’t learn to read till I was eight years old and he didn’t see how in the world I ever got the mail put up at the PO much less read it all and he said if Uncle Rondo could only fathom the lengths he had gone to to get me that job Yes you have met the character Sister in Welty’s “Why I Live at the PO” the unappreciated one of the family who is paranoid that everyone is turning someone against her In most of her stories Welty creates imagery using similes and personification—though some stories seem to drown in them ie “The Whistle” Her prose is so vivid in its appeal especially at the beginning of some stories “The Key” for example that I found myself meandering in the mystery and satire She would not feel anything now except the rain falling She listened for its scattered soft drops between Jamey’s words its uiet touching of the spears of the iris leaves and a clear sound like a bell as it began to fall into a pitcher the cook had set on the doorstep My collection has four volumes Oddly I mostly enjoyed Welty’s first collection 1941 A Curtain of Green And Other Stories Short sweet sensational lyrical prose The Wide Net her 1943 collection was my least favorite non memorable