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The Collected Stories

4.07 of 5 stars 4.07 · rating details · 2,021 ratings · 79 reviews

Despite the enormous success--both critical and popular--of her novel Ship of Fools, Katherine Anne Porter's reputation as one of America's most distinguished writers rest chiefly on her superb short stories. This volume brings together the collections Flowering Judas; Pale Horse, Pale Rider; and The Leaning Tower as well as four stories not available elsewhere in book for...more

Paperback, 495 pages

Published September 19th 1979 by Mariner Books (first published 1965)

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Pulitzer Winners: Fiction & Novels

44th out of 85 books — 914 voters

God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater by Kurt Vonnegut

Everything That Rises Must Converge by Flannery O'Connor

The Collected Stories by Katherine Anne Porter

Best Books of 1965

4th out of 51 books — 14 voters

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Aug 11, 2008 Ruth rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: recently-read, favorites

Somehow, though I was a literature major, I had never read more than a couple of Porter's stories before something recently triggered my decision to check this collection out of the library. Huge thanks to that something, for I enjoyed the reading thoroughly.

Porter has a poet's ability to describe a gesture, a way of moving, or a scene with similes that make your jaw drop, so precise & unexpected & moving they are. "She watched not the boy, but his shadow, fallen like a dark garment agai...more

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Jan 08, 2012 Bap rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: short-stories, fiction

Katherine Anne porter wrote 38 short stories. Her collected short stories garnered her a national book award and the Pulitzer prize. Three stars may be too low. About half the stories were superb, close to a 5. Others did nothing for me. She writes best when she sets the stories in Texas where she grew up.where she w,as born in 1890. There is a gothic element in her writing. Several stories center on handicapped children kept in a state of bondage by their families on farms and there is a heartb...more

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Aug 28, 2010 Agnes Mack rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: pulitzer

This was one of the best collections of short stories I've ever read.

I am not generally a fan of short stories. I like to commit to my literature and short stories tend to feel like a summer fling that was over before Iwas able to analyze it to death and suck all of the fun out it.

Iespecially dislike collections of short stories because even the best authors' voices come through in them. While Itypically like to feel as though Ican hear an author's voice, when it happens during a book of 30 of...more

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Jul 30, 2010 Matthew rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: my-top-books, texana

I have to admire Katherine Ann Porter. So many of her loves died and rejected her, ran away, and deceived her. Somehow she ended up writing truthfully about it. At least I believe her. Her stories do not seem like acts of judgment, since the lovers' sins are not forgiven or changed. Yes, I believe her, because her final relief was to understand it all in a story. What relief? It is only the comfort and joy between reader and author. If I could step back somewhere and propose to Katherine and win...more I have to admire Katherine Ann Porter. So many of her loves died and rejected her, ran away, and deceived her. Somehow she ended up writing truthfully about it. At least I believe her. Her stories do not seem like acts of judgment, since the lovers' sins are not forgiven or changed. Yes, I believe her, because her final relief was to understand it all in a story. What relief? It is only the comfort and joy between reader and author. If I could step back somewhere and propose to Katherine and win her heart we would certainly repeat some of these ugly acts. No solution for love in the stories of Katherine Ann Porter, just the comfort and joy between author and reader.

"He wondered if anybody had ever thought - oh, well, of course everybody else had, he was always making marvelous discoveries that other people had known all along - how impossible it is to explain or to make other eyes see the special qualities in the person you love. There was such a special kind of beauty in Miriam. In certain lights and moods he simply got a clutch in the pit of his stomach when he looked at her. It was something that could happen at any hour of the day, in the midst of the most ordinary occupations. He thought there was something to be said for living with one person day and night the year round. It brings out the worst, but it brings out the best, too, and Miriam's best was pretty damn swell. He couldn't describe it. It was easy to talk about her faults. He remembered all of them, he could add them up against her like rows of figures in a vast unpaid debt. He had lived with her for four years, and even now sometimes he woke out of a sound sleep in a sweating rage with himself, asking himself again why he had ever wasted a minute on her."
-That Tree

"Oh, what is life, she asked herself in desperatete seriousness, in those childish unanswerable words, and what shall I do with it? It is something of my own, she thought in a fury of jealous possessiveness, what shall I make of it? She did not know that she asked herself this because all her earliest training had argued that life was a substance, a material to be used, it took shape and direction and meaning only as the possessor guided and worked it; living was a progress of continuous and varied acts of the will directed towards a definite end. She had been assured that there were good and evil ends, one must make a choice. But what was good, and what was evil? I hate love, she thought, as if this were the answer, I hate love and being loved, I hate it. And her disturbed and seething mind received a shock of comfort from this sudden collaps of an old painful structure of distorted images and misconceptions."
-Noon Wine

Not all of Porter is bombastic revelations on the nature of love. Some of these passages struck me because they came after walking close with some character, knowing them closer than a sister or a brother, and then hearing them decide on something that they had never thought to decide before - it is a joy and comfort.

I first heard of Katherine because she was an astonishing and lucky survivor of the 1918 influenza epidemic. She lived, and when her hair grew back it was all white. The young man that briefly took care of her when she was first struck with the sickness was not alive when she came out of it. Writing about it in 'Pale Horse, Pale Rider' and 'Holiday' is a stunning response to such agony, it doesn't matter if it took decades. I stand up and cheer her.

Here is this:

"He was wearing a new hat of a pretty biscuit shade, for it never occurred to him to buy anything of a practical color; he had put it on for the first time and the rain was spoiling it. She kept thinking, 'But this is dreadful, where will he get another?' She compared it with Eddie's hats that always seemed to be precisely seven years old and as if they had been quite purposely left out in the rain, and yet they sat with a careless and incidental rightness on Eddie. But Camilo was far different; if he wore a shabby hat it would be merely shabby on him, and he would lose his spirits over it. If she had not feared Camilo would take it badly, for he insisted on the little ceremonies up to the point he had fixed for them, she would have said to them as they left Thora's house, 'Do go home. I can surely reach the station by myself.'
'It is written that we must be rained upon tonight,' said Camilo, 'so let it be together.'"
-Theft

Wonderful. I'm so glad to have finally met her, born only ten miles away in the town of Kyle, Texas.(less)

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Dec 01, 2012 Ben rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: pulitizer

The Collected Stories of Katherine Anne Porter took the Pulitzer in 1965 if I could give this 3 1/2 stars that would be more accurate. The book is actually split into 3 parts - the first called Flower Judas and Other stories - mostly very short stories -the second 1/3 is Pale Horse, Pale Rider and I made of three longer stories and the third The Leaning Tower and Other stories. The Flowering Judas stories were OK and the reason I can't give it four. None of them really stood out to me all that m...more

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Sep 18, 2010 Alison rated it 4 of 5 stars

It's hard to rank this book, which comprises three collections and runs from the very bad (most of her stories about Mexico) to the extremely good (the long story “Old Mortality”). I advise readers of this book to skip over the first collection, Flowering Judas and Other Stories and proceed straight to Pale Horse, Pale Rider, which is a solid four stars and will give you everything that's good about Porter's writing (lush characterization, amusing plot quirks that yield major epiphanies, inventi...more It's hard to rank this book, which comprises three collections and runs from the very bad (most of her stories about Mexico) to the extremely good (the long story “Old Mortality”). I advise readers of this book to skip over the first collection, Flowering Judas and Other Stories and proceed straight to Pale Horse, Pale Rider, which is a solid four stars and will give you everything that's good about Porter's writing (lush characterization, amusing plot quirks that yield major epiphanies, inventive prose, and piercing insight into the, like, human heart). Then, move on to The Leaning Tower and Other Stories, which combines some of those merits (insights and epiphanies) with some problematic stuff that will give a sensible, sensitive reader pause.

It's difficult to stomach the encomiums to former slaves who continued to work for their former owners as loyal members of “the family”; Porter's use of the stereotype of childlike and basically unthinking black people (or Mexicans, or Irish people) is disturbing and unfortunately prevalent. In “The Old Order” Porter goes on to problematize her own problematics, in a fascinating way: watch her follow through the logic of the black mammy who loves her white nurselings, by positing a white woman who nurses, and loves, her slave's baby; Porter shows the upheaval in a white family's notions of loyalty and affection when a “loyal” servant, after her beloved (!) mistress has died, refuses to have anything more to do with the white family who'd believed that she loved and needed them. This is interesting material; however, Porter wasn't always willing to invert the stereotypes she exploited; it's not even clear what kind of awareness she had of the stereotypes, or of their inversion. It's possible that, like most people who engage in stereotyping, she believed herself to be simply observing—and that this fault was ramified by her position as a writer who observed professionally, and that the inversions came about because of her interest in plot, particularly absurd, inventive plots, rather than in her noting and wanting to expose any particular truths about race and ethnic relations. It's hard to balance Porter's acceptance of the idea that Germans are racially stolid, graceless, and generally belonging to a lower order of animal, with her astute observations about war, poverty, hunger, and the ways they twist people into unrecognizable shapes, in the story “The Leaning Tower,” written and taking place in Berlin, 1931.

The shortcomings are particularly evident in the early collection Flowering Judas, with its unbearably patronizing attitudes toward Mexicans. It also displays the faults typical of an unseasoned talent. Porter's early stories often show the kind of verbal accomplishment and glib cleverness (particularly in the “gotcha!” endings) that are typical of many story writers' early work (and, perhaps, of the form itself, in the early 20th century); she rises above this mere glibness in “The Jilting of Granny Weatherall” and, to a lesser extent, the title story of the collection (a Mexican story, but a better one, with a great deal more self-consciousness), both of which begin to show off her prodigious talent.

So, how to rate such an uneven collection and such an uneven talent? Four stars, with the caveat of my review.(less)

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Jul 31, 2008 Leslie rated it 5 of 5 stars

When I bought this at Half Price Books a few weeks ago, the clerk said to me "Katherine Anne Porter is such a good writer that she almost makes up for the rest of Texas." I repeated that comment to my parents later, but they didn't find it quite as amusing as I did.

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Feb 20, 2013 Paul Jellinek rated it 5 of 5 stars

Actually, the book I read was the Library of America volume "Katherine Anne Porter: Collected Stories and Other Writings" but for some odd reason Goodreads couldn't come up with that volume. Which is too bad because the "Other Writings" comprise about half of the LOA volume and are often as good as the fictional stories--most of which are superb. I can't believe that it took me this long to discover such an incredible American writer, but I am not complaining. Her descriptive powers, her honesty...more

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Jan 27, 2013 Susan Fetterer rated it 4 of 5 stars

This is the second volume of National Book Award winning stories selected by my book club for study in 2013. Katherine Anne Porter wrote about places she was familiar with; her stories are set in places she lived. Each story in the collection, which won the prestigious award in 1966, reflects cultural and societal mores of the time and locale, spanning the decades of her writing career. Her language is spare and masterful. Each sentence is maximized for impact, having no excess. Whether the stor...more

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Jan 11, 2011 Andrew added it

Shelves: american-fiction, american-short-stories, pre-wwii-american-fiction, southern-fiction

I'm afraid that Katherine Anne Porter is slowly being forgotten by the American body literary, which is unfortunate because she is witty, observant, and deeply influential. I can't imagine the Just-Like-You-and-Me contemporary American writers without the precedent that Porter set.

Her strongest works are the later ones, everything from the stories contained in "Pale Horse, Pale Rider" forward. In particular, "The Leaning Tower" is an unsung wonderment... 30 pages of American-abroad disenchantmen...more

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Sep 17, 2011 Rick rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: fiction

Katherine Anne Porter’s novel Ship of Fools (1962) was a sensation at the time, a top best seller that was made into a Hollywood movie with an all-star cast, but today Porter is best remembered and remains influential for her short fiction. Most of it was written in the 1920s and 30s and much of it, like that of her contemporary, Ernest Hemingway, who also didn’t write much more short fiction after the 20s and 30s, was excellent. The Collected Stories (1965) includes all three of her published s...more Katherine Anne Porter’s novel Ship of Fools (1962) was a sensation at the time, a top best seller that was made into a Hollywood movie with an all-star cast, but today Porter is best remembered and remains influential for her short fiction. Most of it was written in the 1920s and 30s and much of it, like that of her contemporary, Ernest Hemingway, who also didn’t write much more short fiction after the 20s and 30s, was excellent. The Collected Stories (1965) includes all three of her published short fiction books, Flowering Judas and Other Stories (1930), Pale Horse Pale Rider (1937-39), and The Leaning Tower and Other Stories (1944) and deservedly won the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize in 1966.

Porter’s stories are intense, sometimes grim, but tautly written and rich in psychological insight. The earliest stories are set in Mexico and feature either the native people or groups of ex-pats from the US or elsewhere. The last story is set in Germany in the early 30s before the Nazis rise to power, exposing the climate that welcomed them forth. In between are stories involving farm families, Irish ward politicians, revolutionaries, movie folks, and a handful involving a woman named Miranda, set in early childhood through young adult. Whether long or short, the stories are sharp and gritty. They shatter illusions as effortlessly as the protagonist in “The Leaning Tower” accidently destroys a statue of the famous Pisan tower that is his landlady’s romantic keepsake. The great revolutionary, the romantic uncle, love and patriotism, family, and other plaster icons fail to survive in the reader’s hands, no matter how gently they are held or carefully turned. That said, Porter’s stories are not literary bulls in a china shop. They are the antithesis of clumsy and obvious. They are real, nuanced, subtle, suggestive, and potent depictions of individuals afoot in a world that conforms to no convenient ideology or mythology. Life is sloppy with weakness and folly, it is unfortunately rich in obscene forces, and people can use friendship or work or a proper beverage or a willingness to side with the underdog as a mitigating agent for life’s indifference and humanity’s tendency to behave cruelly when given half the chance.(less)

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Mar 17, 2012 Nathan James rated it 1 of 5 stars

Shelves: 2011, lost-interest, short-stories

KAP was recommended to me because I'm such a fan of Flannery O'Connor. I stopped reading this book about 3/4 of the way through. I just wasn't interested. Maybe I'll go back to it later just to say I read it all.

As a writer, she focuses so intently on detailed perceptions that I, as the reader, have a limited sense of the full character. Maybe the writing is too quiet and intricate for my current mind frame. I do know that most of the stories I would finish and then have to go back because i ha...more

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Apr 09, 2010 Lisa rated it 5 of 5 stars

Whenever my sweetheart says "Carveresque," I think of the author standing at the head of a fully-laden Thanksgiving table, long fork and knife in hand, cutting up a manuscript. Talking about short stories the other evening and he suggested Porter's "Rope" as a portrait of a relationship pared down with a super sharp scalpel, and he wasn't kidding -- it's down to the bone. I've got this on my desk now, and will be dipping in. These don't seem like the kind of stories to sit down and read straight...more

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Aug 22, 2009 Caitlin rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: 2009

I'm not generally a big reader of short stories. I want to like them, but mostly end up feeling sort of dissatisfied & not quite filled up. It's like eating a really nice appetizer & nothing else for dinner - two hours later you're scrounging in the fridge for the peanut butter. I guess I just like a longer read.

There are some writers who work within this genre who stand out for me - James Joyce, Raymond Carver, Ernest Hemingway, Ellen Gilchrist, & Alice Adams. All of these writers h...more

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Feb 03, 2008 Anne Sanow rated it 5 of 5 stars

KAP is one of my favorite writers, and this collection is a must-read not only for those who appreciate classic 20th-century stylists such as Hemingway and Faulkner but for those who enjoy contemporary multi-layered narratives of, say, Alice Munro. And though Porter is often considered to be a bit formal, there are passages of her writing that lean toward the experimental that she manages to blend beautifully into her storytelling.

This collection has all of Porter's stories, and it's definitely...more

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Jan 22, 2013 Roxanne Russell rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: pulitzer-fiction, short-stories

One of the first short stories I remember reading critically in high school was "The Jilting of Granny Weatherall." I was surprised to find it in this collection. In grad school, I read "Flowering Judas" and it didn't make much of an impression on me, but this time, it did. I'm learning how revealing re-reading can be. The story I enjoyed most in this collection was the short novel "Noon Wine." Otherwise, though the stories were good enough at times, I found myself bored at times.

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Mar 12, 2013 Book Concierge rated it 2 of 5 stars

Shelves: book-club, concierge, library, short-stories, women-writers

One of our book club members is a fan of the short-story format and she recommended this book. She selected three stories that we were all to read, and suggested that we each read one or two others as well. I understand the superb craft of her writing, but it's not my taste in reading. I certainly noted some wonderful imagery and felt her stream-of-consciousness style is very accessible, still I don't think I'll read more. I wouldn't recommend it to anyone.

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Jul 14, 2012 Sam Jasper rated it 4 of 5 stars

I loved this book. It made me view a short story in a different light. What I mean is that Porter is very good at taking a snippet of something she saw, a moment, and turning that moment into a complete story. Her endings seemed abrupt to me at first, but then I realized that I didn't need a backstory, nor did I need to know what happened to that character or that situation in the future. That moment WAS the story and that was all it needed to be.

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Dec 03, 2009 Brittanie rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: school, women-in-lit

Pale Horse Pale Rider may be my favorite short story. How is it I'd never heard of Porter? Much of her work is autobiographical, and she carries characters through from one story to the next. Her work has a very strong sense of place while at the same time having a sense of other-worldliness. So glad I was introduced to her by an otherwise batshit crazy hateful bitch of a professor.

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Aug 05, 2011 Ronald Wise rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

A refreshing collection of stories from the perspectives of female protagonists, mainly in the South, and dealing with changing times in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. I especially enjoyed the older women in her stories. I learned of this collection from a tribute to the author's birthday (05/15/1890) on Garrison Keillor's Writer's Almanac.

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Sep 05, 2012 J added it

Shelves: favorites

One of my favorite writers of all time, and certainly one of my absolute favorite American authors. Betrayal, self-reflection, death, human misunderstanding, as she writes in Flowering Judas...disunion between how one wants to live and how one actually lives. Her prose is beautiful and a fine art without being just about pretty sentences. She tells real stories that rip your heart out, or have your staring off into space lost in whatever details she has had printed onto the page. The Jilting of...more

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Sep 23, 2011 Lisa Roney rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: general-fiction, southern

Porter was a master of the short story and novella forms, and it's really too bad not many people read her anymore. She didn't have a large output in her life, but her stories gleam like jewels--beautiful prose, stark contemplations, and quiet but interesting plots.

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Jul 29, 2011 Marcos rated it 3 of 5 stars

Very tedious, dry, and overwrought. But some stories, such as "Pale Horse, Pale Rider" and "Noon Wine" stand out vividly as stories of people struggling throughout life in general; with a lot of pessimism and despair. She should have written more novels.

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Mar 12, 2011 Claire Haeg rated it 4 of 5 stars

So why are short stories so universally depressing? Why no uplift? I had to skip a few of these, I admit it. They are indeed very beautifully written. I think she got the national book award for these but I'm not sure. Well worth reading.

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Aug 22, 2011 Andrea rated it 2 of 5 stars

Shelves: pulitzers

I thought to win the Fiction Pulitzer Prize, you had to be about American life. More then half the stories in this book took place in Mexico. I agree with my friend Sarah, the stories have not stood the test of time well.

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Mar 05, 2007 Melissa rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: thenovella

I just finished reading the novella "Old Mortality" within this collection. The story is divided into three parts, all of which focus on one family, particularly the legend of the beautiful and capricious Aunt Amy. In the first section her nieces, Maria and Miranda, listen to the family lore surrounding Amy. In the second, they go to the horse races with their father and have a run-in with Amy's widower. The third section focuses on Miranda, and her first homecoming after running away to be marr...more

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Nov 07, 2012 Alexa Perez added it

Had to read for American Literature 1930s to present. Virgin Violeta was my favorite of the short stories. Maybe a tie between that story and The Grave, actually. I enjoyed KAP.

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Jul 10, 2009 Matt Morris rated it 4 of 5 stars

A great short story writer. Some people get "The Jilting of Granny Weatherall" in high school, but her stories about the Mexican revolution are probably my favorite.

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Jun 15, 2010 Ed Brown rated it 3 of 5 stars

I only read a small portion of this book--the section describing Miranda's experience with the influenza epidemic of 1918. From what I have been able to learn there are very few fictional accounts of this terrible event. Porter's description is very touching. It centers around the song "Pale Horse, Pale Rider" sung by Blacks in the South to express feelings about loved ones carried off, one imagines by slave traders. In Porter's story of that title it also refers to those carried off by the infl...more

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May 07, 2012 Karen rated it 4 of 5 stars

Superb writer, stories of women in the 1930s and 40s. Subtle, unexpected twists, idiosyncrastic characters, fascinating. Beautiful writing.

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About Katherine Anne Porter

Katherine Anne Porter was a Pulitzer Prize-winning American journalist, essayist, short story writer, novelist, and political activist. She is known for her penetrating insight; her works deal with dark themes such as betrayal, death and the origin of human evil.
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