Winner of the 1970 Pulitzer Prize for fiction, this collection of thirty stories includes some of Jean Stafford’s best short fiction from the period 1944 to 1968. Including such favorites as “In the Zoo,” “Children Are Bored on Sunday,” and “Beatrice Trueblood’s Story,” the collection offers the work of this popular writer of the 1940s and 1950s to a new generation of readers and critics.
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“She writes about people whom loneliness has driven slightly mad, but also about people who are secure and comforted; she explores childhood and old age, poverty and wealth, tragedy and comedy…Above all, Miss Stafford will not be hurried…This book is most solidly achieved.”
— New York Review of Books
“Impeccably done.”
— Joyce Carol Oates, New York Times bestseller“To have built up so distinguished a collection, each story excellent in its own way and each an original departure in relation to the others, is a triumph. ”
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Jean Stafford (1915–1979) was the author of three novels and the acclaimed short fiction collection, The Collected Stories of Jean Stafford, which won the 1970 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. She grew up in California and Colorado. After earning both a BA and an MA degree in four years from the University of Colorado, she studied philology in Heidelberg for a year, then moved to New England and began to write. In 1944 she published her first book, Boston Adventure, a bestselling novel of manners, and her second and most highly acclaimed novel, The Mountain Lion, followed in 1947. By 1948, the year in which she received a Guggenheim Fellowship, her work regularly appeared in the New Yorker.
Elisabeth Rodgers is an actress and AudioFile Earphones Award–winning narrator. After graduating from Princeton University, she completed a two-year program at William Esper Studio, where she studied with Maggie Flanigan. Her audiobook narration training came from Robin Miles, who has also directed her in several productions. She has recorded dozens of books for a multitude of publishers.