How does a man become successful although unable to read or write? How does a woman get her final revenge on her husband? What happens when a man invites friends to a party at which he himself doesn't appear, but watches from a distance? What happens to a boy who feels fated to be a genius? These are some of the questions dealt with in the ten stories in this collection. The stories, by important modern authors, have been specially selected for advanced students of English. They are not simplified, but vocabulary explanations and notes are provided in order to help comprehension.
Peter Matthew Hillsman Taylor was a U.S. author and writer. Considered to be one of the finest American short story writers, Taylor's fictional milieu is the urban South. His characters, usually middle or upper class people, often are living in a time of change and struggle to discover and define their roles in society. Peter Taylor also wrote three novels, including A Summons to Memphis in 1986, for which he won the 1987 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and In the Tennessee Country in 1994. His collection The Old Forest and Other Stories (1985) won the PEN/Faulkner Award. Taylor taught literature and writing at Kenyon and the University of Virginia.
I could not shake off the feeling that these stories were too clever for me and I could not understand most of them, but the last story has saved the collection.