by Lee Smith
A celebrated novelist, Lee Smith is likewise recognized as a master of the short story and has been compared with such luminaries as Katherine Ann Porter, Eudora Welty, and Flannery OConnor. Now she collects fourteen storiesseven brand-new ones along with seven favorites from her three earlier collections. The result? A book of dazzling richness.
Famous for unmistakable voices and a craft so strong and sure it seems effortless, Lee Smith's stories strike dead center at the turning points of her characters' lives. Here those characters range from an eight-year-old boy obsessed with vocabulary words to a young bride who has married "way up" to Mrs. Darcy herself, an older woman making it through widowhood her own way. As the New York Times Book Review put it, "In almost every one of [her stories] there is a moment of vision, or love, or unclothed wonder that transforms something plain into something transcendent."
With this collectionher first in thirteen yearsSmith reclaims her place as the reigning queen of the bittersweet short story.
"Smith slips effortlessly into the voices of her funny, smarter-than-they-look characters in her latest collection (after News of the Spirit), containing a handful of new works among some old favorites." - Publishers Weekly
"This is a fiction writer whose work puts her at the top of her game in the crowded field of modern Southern writers." - Library Jounral
"Always colorful, sometimes predictable and at its best profoundly moving." - Kirkus Reviews
This information about Mrs. Darcy and the Blue-Eyed Stranger was first featured
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Lee Smith is the author of fifteen previous books of fictionthree collections of short stories and a dozen novels. The recipient of the 1999 Academy Award in Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, she lives in Hillsborough, North Carolina.
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