The Golden Apples [B0392]

1977 PB reprint of the 1949 original. This classic collection of intertwined short stories of the Mississippi Delta by the Pulitzer Prize–winning author is "a work of art"--The New York Times Book Review. Here in the fictional town of Morgana, Mississippi, the young dream of other places; the old can tell you every name on every stone in the cemetery on the town's edge; and cuckolded husbands and love-starved piano teachers share the same paths. It's also where one neighbor has disappeared on the horizon, slipping away into local legend. Black and white, lonely and the gregarious, sexually adventurous and repressed, vengeful and resigned, restless and settled, the vividly realized characters that make up this collection of interrelated stories, with elements drawn from ancient myth and transplanted to the American South, prove that this National Book Award–winning writer, as Katherine Anne Porter once wrote, had "an ear sharp, shrewd, and true as a tuning fork." "I doubt that a better book about 'the South'-one that more completely gets the feel of the particular texture of Southern life, and its special tone and pattern-has ever been written." -The New Yorker.

From recent Amazon/GoodReads reviews: "We don't get to choose the books of our lives, more's the pity. (My childhood would have contained a few more classics and fewer Point Horrors... but the soul cries out for all kinds of things, and gorges on whatever's there to feed it.) 'The Golden Apples' is one of these for me: I've now read it four times, over fifteen years, and it delights and deepens each time."; "Not an easy read, but a worthwhile one. Welty's ubiquitous allusions to the mythology of Western Civilization will haunt readers long after the last page, forcing them to confront the mythology of their own "heroes" and "villains" and how storytelling can turn evil into good and truth into lies."; "This was hard for me to read, both because the allusions went by me and because of the racism deeply embedded in the book. The writing is amazing and worth taking time to savor, but I just wanted to be finished."; "A very sophisticated style - probably not for everyone. "