Art of the Story

In these powerfully rendered, prizewinning stories, working-class African Americans across the South strive for meaning and search for direction in lives shaped by forces beyond their control The ten stories in this resonant collection deal with both the ties that bind and the gulf that separates generations, from children confronting the fallibility of their own parents for the first time to adults finding themselves forced to start over again and again. In "Highway 18"a young Jehovah's Witness going door to door with an expert field-service partner from up north is at a crossroads: will she go to college or continue to serve the church? "If You Hit Randall County, You've Gone Too Far"tells ofa family trying to make it through a tense celebratory dinner for a son just out on bail. And in the collection's title story, a young girl experiences loss for the first time in the fallout from her father's relationship with her babysitter. Startling, intimate, and prescient on their own, these stories build to a kaleidoscopic understanding of both the individual and the collective black experience over the last fifty years in the American South. With We Are Taking Only What We Need, Stephanie Powell Watts has crafted an incredibly assured and emotionally affecting meditation on everything from the large institutional forces to the small interpersonal moments that impress upon us and direct our lives.

In fifteen funny, colorful, poignant and mysterious stories, the irreverent modernist Katherine Mansfield, a friend and contemporary of D. H. Lawrence and Virginia Woolf, examines a range of themes integral to the human experience, from marriage, family, and death to duty, disillusionment, and regret in this commanding collection, part of the Ecco Art of the Story series. Written towards the end of Katherine Mansfield's tragically short life in the chaotic years after World War I, the fifteen stories in The Garden Party are as fresh, perceptive, and vivid today as they were nearly a century ago. Many are set in the author's native New Zealand while others take place in England or on the French Riviera. In each, Mansfield explores the small yet transformative epiphanies in every day life and illuminates the unspoken, often misunderstood emotions common to us all. In the wry "The Daughters of the Late Colonel," two sisters discover that freedom from their father isn't quite what they expected it to be. A lonely and naïve older woman's contrived sense of self is painfully challenged in "Miss Brill." "At the Bay" considers the plight of a happily married young woman who struggles to find equality with her husband. The Garden Party is an enduring work of literary craftsmanship from a marvelous modern artist.

A collection of newly discovered and never-before-published stories by the late Kathleen Collins, a brilliant yet little-known African American writer, artist, and filmmaker. Exuberant, poignant, perceptive, and full of grace, these sixteen stories by Kathleen Collins explore deep, far-reaching issues-relating to race, gender, family, and sexuality-that shape the ordinary moments in our lives. Collins's work masterfully blends the quotidian and the profound in a personal, intimate way, seamlessly integrating the African American experience into her characters' lives and creating rich and devastatingly familiar characters who transcend symbolism. In "The Uncle," a young girl who idolizes her handsome uncle and his beautiful wife makes a haunting discovery about their lives. In "Only Once," a woman reminisces about her charming daredevil of a lover and his ultimate-and final-act of foolishness. And in the title story, a recent college graduate realizes the limits of the civil rights movement-and the personal and romantic consequences it holds for her. Both contemporary and timeless, Whatever Happened to Interracial Love? is a major and long- overdue addition to our literary canon.

A funny, fresh, and brilliantly insightful collection of stories from a beloved writer, with a new introduction by Francine Prose Johanna Kaplan’s beautifully written stories first burst on the literary scene in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Today they have retained all of their depth, surprise, and humor—their simultaneously scathing, hilarious, and compassionate insight into character and behavior. From Miriam, home from school with the measles, to Louise, the daughter of a family that fled Vienna for the Dominican Republic, to Naomi, a young psychiatrist, her heroines are fierce, tender, funny, and cuttingly smart. At once specific to a particular period, place, and milieu—mainly, Jewish New York in the decades after World War II—Kaplan’s stories resonate with universal significance. In this new collection, which includes both early and later stories, unforgettably vivid characters are captured in all of their forceful presence and singularity, their foolishness and their wisdom, their venality and their nobility, while, hovering in the background, the inexorable passage of time and the unending pull of memory render silent judgment. In its pitch-perfect command of dialogue matched with interwoven subtleties of insight and feeling and a masterful control of language, Loss of Memory Is Only Temporary is itself a timeless collection of the finest work by one of the most extraordinary talents of our age.