The Collected Stories of Hortense Calisher

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Finalist for the National Book Award: Thirty-six stories by O. Henry Award–winning novelist Hortense CalisherThe Collected Stories of Hortense Calisher gathers short pieces that chart the author’s best-loved themes of mindful consciousness and social worlds. This collection includes one of her well-known New Yorker* stories, “In Greenwich There Are Many Gravelled Walks,” in which a young man drops his mother off at a sanitarium and acquires a new friend who finally awakens him to the world. Also included are “The Sound of Waiting,” one of the chapters in the Elkin family saga; the chilling, Jamesian “The Scream on Fifty-seventh Street,” in which a New York widow hears a scream late one night but cannot decide how to investigate without appearing to her neighbors to have gone mad; and the nearly novella-length “The Summer Rebellion.”Review“These are stories that anyone will enjoy and after reading them will be anxious to go on to her novels and other writings.” —The Lewiston Daily Sun“The pride her characters take in their roots is as essential a theme as the moment of triumphant insight that so neatly rounds off Calisher’s crafted tales of very real people.” —Kirkus ReviewsAbout the AuthorHortense Calisher (1911–2009) was born in New York City. The daughter of a young German-Jewish immigrant mother and a somewhat older Jewish father from Virginia, she graduated from Barnard College in 1932 and worked as a sales clerk before marrying and moving to Nyack, New York, to raise her family. Her first book, a collection of short stories titled In the Absence of Angels, appeared in 1951. She went on to publish two dozen more works of fiction and memoir, writing into her nineties.A past president of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and of PEN, the worldwide association of writers, she was a National Book Award finalist three times, won an O. Henry Award for “The Night Club in the Woods” and the 1986 Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize for The Bobby Soxer, and was awarded Guggenheim Fellowships in 1952 and 1955.