All the Days and Nights: The Collected Stories [L0045]

1995 - PB Nice clean condition. From the American Book Award-winning author of Ancestors and Time Will Darken comes a masterful collection of stories, spanning more than 50 years--a tour of a world that engages readers entirely, and whose characters command the deepest loyalty and tenderness.

Whether he is writing about a small town in turn-of-the-century Illinois or a precariously balanced enclave of the good life on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, Maxwell has the power to immerse us completely in his fictional worlds and to elicit our allegiance to his characters. The paper boy plying his route (and anxiously contemplating his awakening sexuality) under the all-seeing eye of God; the couple who come home one Christmas Day to find their home ransacked by burglars; the American tourist traveling through a France that has changed irreparably since his last visit --- as told by William Maxwell, their stories become our own, at once fresh and familiar, unsettling and deeply comforting.

From recent Amazon/GoodReads reviews: "Maxwell's themes are of happiness lost, an ever changing world, seeking security in an insecure world, how permanence is only in the memory and too, how our ideal world was anything but for the people in it-particularly black people. These tales truly haunt. The 'Improvisations' are fairy tales, for want of a better term, but explore the same themes and are as superb as the stories preceding them. Maxwell is said to have helped shape the prose style of Cheever, Updike and O'Hara, and he certainly is the best of all these rolled into one. On "Desert Island" programmes, you are asked what book you would take with you -- William Maxwell's "All the Days and Nights" would be mine."; "These short stories are best read slowly. They contain lovingly detailed characters, characters that require you to spend the time to get to know them. Maxwell examines some rather ordinary people in their ordinary life struggles. The "improvisations" at the end of the book are rather unique, and their genesis as improvised bedtime stories to his wife, mesh perfectly with the themes of the rest of the stories."; "Maxwell will forever be a comfort read for me.This collection of short stories is warm, restrained and beautifully written. In each story, you'll undoubtedly find a heartfelt aphorism or general observation."