Collected Stories of Eudora Welty, The by Eudora Welty, Ann Patchett (Introduction); 1980/2019. Softcover.

Eudora Welty’s Collected Stories confirms her place as a contemporary master of short fiction. Welty wrote novels, novellas, and reviews over the course of her long career, but the heart and soul of her literary vision lay with the short story. The forty‑one pieces collected here, written over a period of three decades, include “A Petrified Man,” “Why I Live at the P.O.,” “The Wide Net,” and “The Bride of Innisfallen.”

Her style seamlessly shifts from the comic to the tragic, from realistic portraits to surrealistic ones, as she deftly moves between folklore and myth, race and history, family and farce, and the Mississippi landscape she knew so well, her wry wit and keen sense of observation always present on the page.