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The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty
by Eudora Welty

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<a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/12577.The_Collected_Stories_of_Eudora_Welty?utm_medium=api&amp;utm_source=blog_review" style="float: left; padding-right: 20px"><img alt="The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty" border="0" src="http://s3.amazonaws.com/photo.goodreads.com/books/1166505020m/12577.jpg" /></a> <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/12577.The_Collected_Stories_of_Eudora_Welty?utm_medium=api&utm_source=blog_review">The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty</a> by <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/7973.Eudora_Welty">Eudora Welty</a><br/><br/>
  <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/25335483?utm_medium=api&utm_source=blog_review"><h3>My review</h3></a>
  rating: 5 of 5 stars<br/>Having cut my literary teeth on Flannery O'Connor, I pshawed "Miss Eudora" whenever she entered the conversation regarding short story writers, assuming (without having actually read her, mind you) that she wrote polite little stories of Southern manners that didn't belong on the same shelf with Flannery.  I freely admit now that attitude belonged to an ignoramus of embarrassingly shallow depths.  It took just one story, "The Petrified Man," to straighten me out.  In fact, her entire first collection, A Curtain of Green, is as tough as anything Hemingway produced in his stories, and I dare say, she has more range that Hemingway and O'Connor (who can seem a trifle deterministic and predictable over the course of several stories in comparison).  Keela, the Outcast Indian Maiden; The Hitch-Hikers (which makes nice companion with O'Connor's A Good Man is Hard to Find), A Curtain of Green, Clytie, and Powerhouse have a wry toughness and compassion that I've not encountered elsewhere (on the other hand, Why I Live at the PO and A Worn Path, stories that get anthologized ad nauseum, are lesser works, in my opinion). <br/>  Over the course of her career, Welty's stories become more lyrical and ambiguous, and while I have favorites from all points of her output, nothing can top one of her final stories, No Place for You, My Love, in probing the mysteries that govern the human heart.  It ranks up there with Melville's "Barleby the Scrivener," Hemingway's "Big Two-Hearted River," O'Connor's "A Good Man is Hard to Find," and Baldwin's "Sonny's Blues," as the one of the greatest of American short stories.  This entire collection confirms Borges' statement that "Unlike the novel, the short story may be, for all purposes, essential."
  <br/><br/><a href="http://www.goodreads.com/review/list/1245181?utm_medium=api&utm_source=blog_review">View all my reviews.</a>

Tom's review
rating:
bookshelves: short-stories

Having cut my literary teeth on Flannery O'Connor, I pshawed "Miss Eudora" whenever she entered the conversation regarding short story writers, assuming (without having actually read her, mind you) that she wrote polite little stories of Southern manners that didn't belong on the same shelf with Flannery. I freely admit now that attitude belonged to an ignoramus of embarrassingly shallow depths. It took just one story, "The Petrified Man," to straighten me out. In fact, her entire first collection, A Curtain of Green, is as tough as anything Hemingway produced in his stories, and I dare say, she has more range that Hemingway and O'Connor (who can seem a trifle deterministic and predictable over the course of several stories in comparison). Keela, the Outcast Indian Maiden; The Hitch-Hikers (which makes nice companion with O'Connor's A Good Man is Hard to Find), A Curtain of Green, Clytie, and Powerhouse have a wry toughness and compassion that I've not encounter...more

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