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Peter Taylor: The Complete Stories (boxed set)

Edited by Ann Beattie

For the first time, the complete stories of the master chronicler of tradition and transformation in the twentieth-century South are available—in a deluxe two-volume Library of America boxed set.

Overview
Table of Contents

Overview

Interviews Ann Beattie on the short fiction of Peter Taylor: “He just transcends every category”
November 6, 2017

Story of the Week Peter Taylor, “Je Suis Perdu”
October 16, 2017

Born and raised in Tennessee, Peter Taylor was the great chronicler of the American Upper South, capturing its gossip and secrets, its divided loyalties and morally complicated legacies in tales of pure-distilled brilliance. Now, for his centennial year, the Library of America and acclaimed short story writer Ann Beattie present an unprecedented two-volume edition of Taylor’s complete short fiction, all fifty-nine of the stories published in his lifetime in the order in which they were composed.

Volume One offers twenty-nine early masterpieces, including such classics as “A Spinster’s Tale,” “What You Hear from ’Em?,” “Venus, Cupid, Folly and Time” and “Miss Leonora When Last Seen.” As a special feature, an appendix in the first volume gathers three stories Taylor published as an undergraduate that show the early emergence of his singular style and sensibility.

Volume Two presents thirty stories including many of his most ambitious works, among them “Dean of Men,” a monologue delivered by a middle-aged father to his long-haired son about the limits of idealism; “In the Miro District,” a parable of the Old South’s enduring persistence in the New; and “The Old Forest,” one of Taylor’s most celebrated works, the story of a young man who jeopardizes his impending marriage by consorting with a girl deemed beneath his station. Here too are all five of Taylor’s remarkable prose poems, stories in free verse that demonstrate that great fiction is, at its highest pitch, a line-by-line, image-by-image high-wire act. Two of the stories in this volume, “A Cheerful Disposition” and “The Megalopolitans,” are collected here for the first time.

Each Library of America series volume is printed on acid-free paper and features Smyth-sewn binding, a full cloth cover, and a ribbon marker.
Table of Contents

Introduction by Ann Beattie

A Spinster’s Tale
Cookie
Sky Line
The Fancy Woman
The School Girl
A Walled Garden
Attendant Evils
Rain in the Heart
The Scoutmaster
Allegiance
A Long Fourth
Porte Cochere
A Wife of Nashville
Their Losses
Uncles
Two Ladies in Retirement
What You Hear from ’Em?
Bad Dreams
The Dark Walk
1939
The Other Times
Venus, Cupid, Folly and Time
Promise of Rain
Je Suis Perdu
A Friend and Protector
Guests
The Little Cousins
Heads of Houses
Miss Leonora When Last Seen
Reservations: A Love Story
Nerves
An Overwhelming Question
There
Demons
At the Drugstore
Two Pilgrims
The Throughway
At the Art Theater
The End of Play
A Cheerful Disposition
The Decline and Fall of the Episcopal Church in the Year of Our Lord 1952
Mrs. Billingsby’s Wine
The Elect
First Heat
In the Waiting Room
Dean of Men
Daphne’s Lover
The Real Ghost
The Instruction of a Mistress
The Hand of Emmagene
Three Heroines
The Megalopolitans
Her Need
The Captain’s Son
In the Miro District
The Old Forest
The Gift of the Prodigal
The Witch of Owl Mountain Springs: An Account of Her Remarkable Powers
The Oracle at Stoneleigh Court

UNDERGRADUATE STORIES 1936–1939
The Party
The Lady Is Civilized
The Life Before

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ISBN: 978-1-59853-541-9 1458 pages

LOA books are distributed worldwide by Penguin Random House

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