are few signs that prayers to God or to some intercessory saint—say a seizure-ridden Spanish mystic or his simple cousin Sook—were ever a steady concern of Truman Capote’s life, but his lifelong pursuit of wide attention and wealth was appallingly successful. Before he was forty, he’d achieved both aims, in tidal profusion and utter heartbreak.

In his final wreckage, this slender collection of short stories may well have seemed to Capote the least of his fulfillments; but in the arena of expressed human feeling, they represent his most impressive victory. From the torment of a life willed on him, first, by a viciously neglectful father and a mother who should never have borne a child and, then, by his own refusal to conquer his personal hungers, he nonetheless won on the battlefield of English prose these stories that, at their best, should stand for long years to come as calm enduring prayers and accomplished blessings—free for every reader to use.

REYNOLDS PRICE was born in Macon, North Carolina in 1933. Educated at Duke University and, as a Rhodes Scholar, at Merton College, Oxford University, he has taught at Duke since 1958 and is J.B. Professor of English. His first novel, A Long and Happy Life, was published in 1962 and won the William Faulkner Award. His sixth novel, Kate Vaiden, was published in 1986 and won the National Book Critics Circle Award. Noble Norfleet, his twelfth novel, was published in 2002. In all, he has published thirty-five volumes of fiction, poetry, plays, essays and translations. Price is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and his work has been translated into seventeen languages.

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