The Collected Stories [Paperback]

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 perhaps best known as a novelist and poet, Price here likewise demonstrates his mastery of the short story.
These fifty stories include two early collections --The Names and Faces of HeroesandPermanent Errors-- as well as more than two dozen stories that are gathered only inThe Collected Stories.In his introduction, the author explains how, at one point, he wrote no stories for almost twenty years. But, he writes, once I needed -- for unknown reasons in a new and radically altered life -- to return to the story, it opened before me like a new chance. Indeed, chances abound here in stories that will astonish even Price's most devoted readers as they travel through not only the author's native North Carolina but also Jerusalem, the American Southwest, Europe, and Asia.Chapter 1

FULL DAY

Early afternoon in the midst of fall; but the sun was behind him, raw-egg streaks of speedy light from a ball-sized furnace in a white sky. Buck even skewed his rearview mirror to dodge the hot glare that would only be natural three hours from now.Am I nodding off?He thought he should maybe pull to the shoulder and rest for ten minutes. No, he'd yet to eat; his breakfast biscuit was thinning out. One more call; then he'd push on home, be there by dark. But he took the next sharp bend in the road; and damn, the light was still pouring at him, redder now.

Buck shrugged in his mind and thought of a favorite fact of his boyhood -- how he'd searched old papers and books of his father's for any word on the great Krakatoa volcanic eruption in 1883. He'd heard about it years later in school -- how an entire island went up that August in the grandest blast yet known to man. The sea for miles was coated with powdered rock so thicl/