V.S. Prictchett, one of our greatest living short-story writers, has chosen some forty stories written in the English language to produce a collection that successfully displays the wealth and variety of an art that spans some 200 years.

Great Britain, America, and especially Eire have fine traditions of short-story writing that have developed from the time of Sir Walter Scott and Nathaniel Hawthorne, while in this century the art has been perfected by Ernest Hemingway, D.H. Lawrence, W. Somerset Maugham, John Updike, and V.S. Pritchett himself. The Irish contribution includes such masters as James Joyce, Frank O'Conner, and Liam O'Flaherty, and stories by Canadian, Indian, New Zealand, and Austrailian writers show the full range of invention and ability in a genre that continues to flourish.