The Collected Stories

For over three decades, Reynolds Price has been one of America's most distinguished writers, in a career that has been remarkable both for its virtuosity and for the variety of literary forms he has embraced. Now he shows himself as much a master of the story as he is of the novel, in a volume that presents fifty stories, including two early collections as well as more than two dozen new stories that have never been gathered together before.

In his introduction, Mr Price explains how, after the publication of his first two collections, he wrote no new stories for almost twenty years. "But 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....A collection like this then," he adds, "...will show a writer's preoccupations in ways the novel severely rations"(novels are partly made for that purpose - the release from self, long flights through the Other). 

Reynolds Price's first short stories, and many later ones, are published in his Collected Stories. A Long and Happy Life was published in 1962 and won the William Faulkner Award for best first novel. Kate Vaiden was published in 1986 and won the National Book Critics Circle Award. The Good Priest's Son in 2005 was his fourteenth novel. Among his thirty-seven volumes are further collections of fiction, poetry, plays, essays, and translations.