William Maxwell’s stories sometimes are not stories; they’re little novels in the mode of Alice Munro, packing decades into paragraphs. His subjects are a small town in Illinois and scenes from lives led in New York, where he was a magazine editor. Some of the tales in this collection are gems of gentle irony that end in a flash; others dwindle like the day’s last light. There are strivers, old maids, flops, busybodies, and family secrets throughout. Maxwell’s style is clear, beautifully paced, and subtly evocative of certain times and certain places: where the old railroad bridge still stands, out […]