Collected Stories of Reynolds Price

by Reynolds Price

Book Overview

For more than four decades, Reynolds Price has been one of America's most distinguished writers, with a career remarkable both for its virtuosity and for the variety of literary forms embraced. Though... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0689121474
• ISBN13: 9780689121470
• Release Date: June 1993
• Publisher: Scribner Book Company
• Length: 640 Pages
• Weight: 0.70 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.4" x 6.4" x 9.6"

Customer Reviews

Good

While reading Reynolds Price's The Collected Stories (culled from his two prior collections- The Names and Faces of Heroes and Permanent Errors- as well as new tales) it occurred to me that he was chiefly a proponent of the idea that it is better to have an ambition to excel rather than an ambition to acquire. Almost all of Price's protagonists seek to better themselves in the face of death, hardship, ignominy, or the like, yet few subscribe to the materialism that plagues his native land. Thus, he seems to come from an older time when this was the rule- not the exception, even though he was born in 1933, well into the Twentieth Century. In a sense, the best of his short stories, which is the bulk of the thirty-nine herein collected, are both a paean to that ideal, as well as an exemplary illustration of the classic difference between which sort of writing dominates a writer's mind- the intellectual and analytical, or the emotional and spiritual. Writers such as Richard Ford and William Trevor (whose Collected Stories I read alternating with Price's) are clearly in the former camp. They look at things, characters, and situations intently, placing emphasis on such to the point that often incisive soliloquies break out. Writers like Monica Wood or Edward P. Jones are clearly emotional writers foremost. This does not mean their stories lack intellect, just as Trevor's, nor Ford's, lack emotion, simply that emotion is the primal reason for their storytelling. Reynolds Price sits almost squarely on the fence between those two camps. He is a wonderfully evocative writer about the body, memory, death, and emotion, yet he can discourse with the best of them- and not in the pseudo-babbling of Postmodernists like a David Foster Wallace or Rick Moody, who cannot even masturbate well, much less carry a narrative. That said, his work might have the most enduring qualities of all the aforementioned writers. The odd thing is that I first knew him as a bad poet- one whose early work showed potential, but whose later verse became stale and academic- as it now occupies a place on my shelf for prosists-cum-poetasters like John Updike, Evan S. Connell, Tennessee Williams, Eugene O'Neill, Raymond Carver, Edward Abbey, and Loren Eiseley. What amazes me is how people who are utterly devoid of originality and music in poetry can be so masterful in prose. The difference may be sharpest with Price. And the most clear-cut schism may be with a series of small prose pieces that are really mood pieces, and, as such, are really more accurately proems- and the equal of the best of a Georg Trakl or Rainer Maria Rilke. In fact, I would have put these pieces in with his Collected Poems, not Collected Stories....One of the best things about this Collected Stories is that it is a true book, not merely a compendium. The stories are put in a good order, with short tales allowing breathing space for the longer, richer tales. Too often, in de facto Best Of collections, the tales are