The Collected Stories

Evan S. Connell is one of America's most distinguished prose stylists, and this volume offers a major portion of his lifework. With Mrs. Bridge and Mr. Bridge, Connell stands at the forefront of American novelists. His critically acclaimed Son of the Morning Star, together with The White Lantern and A Long Desire, prove him also among the best nonfiction authors of the past several decades. A "writer's writer," Connell is a great artist whose influence has changed the way Americans craft fiction today.
The Collected Stories of Evan S. Connell gathers fifty-six stories written between 1946 and 1995 and incorporates the contents of Connell's three previous collections. Also included are twenty-eight stories never before published in book form, thirteen of them written in the past five years.

Connell, now 70, is a consummate craftsman who has enjoyed some remarkable successes (Mrs. Bridge and Son of the Morning Star) but who has never developed a clear literary profile. The publication of his collected stories is a bold move by new Counterpoint (run out of Washington, D.C., by Jack Shoemaker, formerly of North Point), but it is not clear that such an effort is justified by the work. It is an odd profile as a story writer the enigmatic Connell presents here: among the 56 stories, more than half were written in the 1950s, almost none for 30 years following the mid-'60s, then a sudden burst of creativity, with a dozen stories written in the past two years. There are common themes, even common characters, running throughout. A writer called Koerner represents some aspects of Connell himself (a taciturn loner who surveys the literary scene with some disdain); Mr. Muhlbach, an insurance executive who feels that life is passing him by?and who stars in two of the most memorable stories, "St. Augustine's Pigeon" and "Otto and the Magi"?seems emblematic of the solid bourgeois St. Louis world in which Connell grew up, and which also gave birth to Mr. and Mrs. Bridge; Leon and Bebert are a pair of cutups who become involved in farcical situations and absurdist conversations. The material is carefully distanced, the narration observant but deadpan, the style, particularly in the earlier stories and sketches, Hemingway-plain. The recent, previously unpublished stories show a growing warmth: "Noah's Ark" is a touching vignette of the trials of faith; "Cantinflas and the Cop" is a harrowing sketch of the impact of urban violence; and "Mrs. Proctor Bemis" shows that Connell is perfectly capable of bringing Mrs. Bridge up to the moment. The question remains whether the oeuvre deserves a book of this scope; perhaps just the new and uncollected stories would have made a more digestible volume.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Short fiction is an art unto itself, more confined and thus more rigorous than the novelist's canvas. This volume of 56 stories spans a lifetime of masterly literary craftsmanship and includes 13 recent and 15 older stories never before collected in book form. The stories are arranged by an internal logic of theme and substance, usually juxtaposing the older with the newer. Amazingly, Connell's distinctive economy of style is constant over the years, as is his quirky, compassionate view of humankind (witness the 1950s husband and wife in "Corset," where a staid matron does cartwheels and walks on her hands in the nude to keep her husband's love). Only the subject matter and the larger reflection of society clue the reader to the story's era. Best known for his novels Mrs. Bridge (1959) and Mr. Bridge (1969)?both available as reprints from Farrar?Connell offers here short fiction equally deserving of attention. Highly recommended.?Linda Rome, Middlefield Lib., Ohio
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.