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The Collected Stories of Jean Stafford
These Pulitzer Prize-winning stories represent the major short works of fiction by one of the most distinctively American stylists of her day. Jean Stafford communicates the small details of loneliness and connection, the search for freedom and the desire to belong, that not only illuminate whole lives but also convey with an elegant economy of words the sense of the place and time in which her protagonists find themselves. The Collected Stories of Jean Stafford includes the acclaimed story "An Influx of Poets," which has never before appeared in book form.
463 pages, Kindle Edition
First published January 1, 1969
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About the author
Jean Stafford
100 books94 followersJean Stafford was an American short story writer and novelist, who won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for The Collected Stories of Jean Stafford in 1970.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 119 reviews
June 5, 2020
Well, I see it has taken me 2 months to finish this one, but I don't like to read short stories one after the other, so I parceled these out. They are all a bit surprising, taking you to places you didn't realize you were going, and her women and children are not happy creatures at all, but what a stylist she is. Her sentences are works of art. Enjoyable and worth reading.
February 1, 2021
The Collected Stories of Jean Stafford won the 1970 Pulitzer and having finished it, I have completed the last 50 years of Pulitzers (1970-2020). I felt that this collection was a bit uneven. There are actually four collections inside: stories about ex-pats (The Innocents Abroad), Bostonian stories (The Bostonians, and other Manifestations of the American Scene), Western/Colorado stories (Cowboys and Indians and Magic Mountains), and Manhattan stories (Manhattan Island). I did not really enjoy the first section finding myself put off by the ostentatious wealth and ennui of the characters. However, I then mosied over to Wikipedia to learn that she had been (unhappily) married to the American poet Robert Lowell (our own Rimbaud in many senses) and that the story 'The Interior Castle' was autobiographical about barely surviving a car accident (Robert was driving and walked away unharmed) in which she was permanently scarred and had to have her nose (painfully) reconstructed. The story is well-written, but painful to read. The story 'In The Zoo' in the western section won several literary awards.
Stafford was a great writer in describing interior landscapes, but I felt that I had a hard time connecting with and sympathizing with her characters, more so than in short stories by John Cheever (winner of the 1979 Pulitzer). I have not quite figured out why. There is a certain abject depression inherent to many of the stories and despite the title "Magic Mountains" in the third section, I felt her descriptions of nature were superficial (compared to, say, those of Anne Proulx in Close Range, Pulitzer runner-up in 2000). So, perhaps the writing deserves 4 stars, but the enjoyment of the writing for me was only 3 stars.
It is unfortunate that she was so sad in her life and died so unhappily at only 62. This sadness and a sense of fatalism cast a long shadow across her writing.
My rating of all the Pulitzer Winners: https://www.goodreads.com/list/show/1...
Stafford was a great writer in describing interior landscapes, but I felt that I had a hard time connecting with and sympathizing with her characters, more so than in short stories by John Cheever (winner of the 1979 Pulitzer). I have not quite figured out why. There is a certain abject depression inherent to many of the stories and despite the title "Magic Mountains" in the third section, I felt her descriptions of nature were superficial (compared to, say, those of Anne Proulx in Close Range, Pulitzer runner-up in 2000). So, perhaps the writing deserves 4 stars, but the enjoyment of the writing for me was only 3 stars.
It is unfortunate that she was so sad in her life and died so unhappily at only 62. This sadness and a sense of fatalism cast a long shadow across her writing.
My rating of all the Pulitzer Winners: https://www.goodreads.com/list/show/1...
May 24, 2020
These stories are quintessentially American. Each character is real and identifiable. And although Stafford's vocabulary is immense and her prose is lyrical the people were nonetheless accessible and likable. I knew nothing of Stafford before deciding to read all of the Pulitzer winners, and although I am not always a fan of short stories, she won me over.
The stories are often dark, sad and tragic and still the wit is so clever that I often found myself laughing out loud. Often the stories have ambiguous endings. Often they made me tear up. The loneliness throughout is devastating and completely relatable. Each of them is seeking peace and happiness. They desire contentment. But we also recognize ourselves in them because we have experienced the forlorn and devastating emotions that come from feeling alienated.
The Collected Stories of Jean Stafford is divided into four parts, where the stories are about Americans living abroad, people living in Boston, people located in the Midwest and some in Manhattan. They range in ages from young children to the elderly. They cross all social norms. Some are wealthy but most are not. Some are married. And most of the characters are women, each of which is vivid and real. I found the collection smartly feminist, with each character exploring the many roles of women. She pushes gender norms, and makes the reader think, but it is all wrapped up in an enjoyable collection.
The stories are often dark, sad and tragic and still the wit is so clever that I often found myself laughing out loud. Often the stories have ambiguous endings. Often they made me tear up. The loneliness throughout is devastating and completely relatable. Each of them is seeking peace and happiness. They desire contentment. But we also recognize ourselves in them because we have experienced the forlorn and devastating emotions that come from feeling alienated.
The Collected Stories of Jean Stafford is divided into four parts, where the stories are about Americans living abroad, people living in Boston, people located in the Midwest and some in Manhattan. They range in ages from young children to the elderly. They cross all social norms. Some are wealthy but most are not. Some are married. And most of the characters are women, each of which is vivid and real. I found the collection smartly feminist, with each character exploring the many roles of women. She pushes gender norms, and makes the reader think, but it is all wrapped up in an enjoyable collection.
February 6, 2024
I read this over a couple of months, in combination with another collection of short stories, alternating back and forth. This collection is the author’s short-story output over her lifetime. It won her the Pulitzer Prize in 1970. She also produced three novels but wrote very little fiction after her third husband’s death in 1963. There was much unhappiness in Stafford’s life: divorces, physical pain, alcohol abuse and depression. This unhappiness comes through in many of her stories.
The stories varied from excellent to dry. Of the 30 stories, I rated eight 5 stars, nine 4 stars, ten 3 stars and three 2 stars. Perhaps the most unforgettable story was The Interior Castle. In real life Jean Stafford was in a bad auto accident with her first husband that left her physically disfigured, with a recovery requiring multiple surgeries; apparently, she never fully recovered. The Interior Castle appears to be a fictionalized memoir of that time; it is not a pleasant read but really impressed me.
In the collection the stories are not organized in the order of publication but instead are grouped based on the general locale of story. Jean Stafford spent some of her formative years in Colorado and attended the University of Colorado at Boulder. One of the sections of The Collected Stories is Cowboys and Indians and Magic Mountains; the stories in this section are centered on the imagined town of Adams, Colorado. I found these stories to be the most consistently enjoyable of the collection. In the story In the Zoo Daisy and her sister lose their parents when they are 10 and 8; from the East coast, they are sent to live in Adams, Colorado with a friend of their grandmother’s, Mrs. Placer, who they have never met. Mrs. Placer keeps a boarding house and makes the two girls feel that she is doing them a huge favor. The two girls meet Mr. Murphy, a kind drunk who keeps an array of animals and gives the girls a dog, until Mrs. Placer co-opts the pet as her own.
In the stories where Jean Stafford quickly introduces characters, I was engaged and thoroughly enjoyed myself, even though the outcome of most stories was not uplifting. In other cases, where Stafford spent more time setting the stage or in which the characters did not play a significant role, I was less enamored. Almost across the board, however, I admired Stafford’s prose.
The stories varied from excellent to dry. Of the 30 stories, I rated eight 5 stars, nine 4 stars, ten 3 stars and three 2 stars. Perhaps the most unforgettable story was The Interior Castle. In real life Jean Stafford was in a bad auto accident with her first husband that left her physically disfigured, with a recovery requiring multiple surgeries; apparently, she never fully recovered. The Interior Castle appears to be a fictionalized memoir of that time; it is not a pleasant read but really impressed me.
In the collection the stories are not organized in the order of publication but instead are grouped based on the general locale of story. Jean Stafford spent some of her formative years in Colorado and attended the University of Colorado at Boulder. One of the sections of The Collected Stories is Cowboys and Indians and Magic Mountains; the stories in this section are centered on the imagined town of Adams, Colorado. I found these stories to be the most consistently enjoyable of the collection. In the story In the Zoo Daisy and her sister lose their parents when they are 10 and 8; from the East coast, they are sent to live in Adams, Colorado with a friend of their grandmother’s, Mrs. Placer, who they have never met. Mrs. Placer keeps a boarding house and makes the two girls feel that she is doing them a huge favor. The two girls meet Mr. Murphy, a kind drunk who keeps an array of animals and gives the girls a dog, until Mrs. Placer co-opts the pet as her own.
In the stories where Jean Stafford quickly introduces characters, I was engaged and thoroughly enjoyed myself, even though the outcome of most stories was not uplifting. In other cases, where Stafford spent more time setting the stage or in which the characters did not play a significant role, I was less enamored. Almost across the board, however, I admired Stafford’s prose.
January 19, 2024
This was a great collection of stories that were all very different. Many of the stories had an almost horror/gothic quality that succeeded in creeping me out. The most chilling one was about a woman who had her face operated on (while she was awake!) after a horrible accident. It was creepy from start to finish. Others moved forward being seemingly more normal only to end in horror like a somewhat everyday story that ends with a tragic boating accident that has gruesome aftereffects . Another story gets your shackles up when some bullies plot medical experiments on their victim. One story even deals with Cannibalism.
The stories that weren't frightening were often sad and dealt with mental illness or alcohol abuse. One has a compulsive eater who also seems to have bi-polar disorder. Another where a drunken father has his toddler's beautiful golden curls cut off to spite his wife. Or there's a story about a couple who lives in the country and the husband becomes crazy and verbally/emotionally abusive towards his wife. All the stories were well written with an expansive vocabulary and usually included an element of humor even when frightening or sad.
One story that stood out for me was The Lippia Lawn. It takes place within the Cumberland Plateau in Deer Lick Falls (referred to as Deer Lick) near Chattanooga TN. Unlike most of the stories, this didn't have a plot and didn't rely on shock value, sadness or humor. It was a beautiful story of nostalgia and longing. The narrator is a young woman who is helping an old man who is upset by the changes happening around him. He is very connected to his land and the nature around him. The narrator is helping him find a native plant that he wants to replant on his property. She is struck by the way his memories are so vivid while hers are foggy. She attributes this difference to him having lived in the same place all his life while it seems she has likely moved around a lot and attributes that to her more fragmented memories. The way Stafford wove, the lives of plants with the lives of people was really well done. The whole story has a dreamlike quality where the narrator is never formally introduced and we aren't told about how the two came together. There's no real beginning or end. It's hard to describe but it's now among my favorite short stories.
I read the introduction by Joyce Carol Oates after reading the stories and wasn't surprised to find out that Jean Stafford was not a happy person. From things described in the intro there were quite a few stories that seemed likely at least partially autobiographical. I'm glad that she was blessed with having an impressive writing talent as an outlet for her pain.
The stories that weren't frightening were often sad and dealt with mental illness or alcohol abuse. One has a compulsive eater who also seems to have bi-polar disorder. Another where a drunken father has his toddler's beautiful golden curls cut off to spite his wife. Or there's a story about a couple who lives in the country and the husband becomes crazy and verbally/emotionally abusive towards his wife. All the stories were well written with an expansive vocabulary and usually included an element of humor even when frightening or sad.
One story that stood out for me was The Lippia Lawn. It takes place within the Cumberland Plateau in Deer Lick Falls (referred to as Deer Lick) near Chattanooga TN. Unlike most of the stories, this didn't have a plot and didn't rely on shock value, sadness or humor. It was a beautiful story of nostalgia and longing. The narrator is a young woman who is helping an old man who is upset by the changes happening around him. He is very connected to his land and the nature around him. The narrator is helping him find a native plant that he wants to replant on his property. She is struck by the way his memories are so vivid while hers are foggy. She attributes this difference to him having lived in the same place all his life while it seems she has likely moved around a lot and attributes that to her more fragmented memories. The way Stafford wove, the lives of plants with the lives of people was really well done. The whole story has a dreamlike quality where the narrator is never formally introduced and we aren't told about how the two came together. There's no real beginning or end. It's hard to describe but it's now among my favorite short stories.
I read the introduction by Joyce Carol Oates after reading the stories and wasn't surprised to find out that Jean Stafford was not a happy person. From things described in the intro there were quite a few stories that seemed likely at least partially autobiographical. I'm glad that she was blessed with having an impressive writing talent as an outlet for her pain.
May 6, 2013
I'm just not a fan. She writes more about state of mind, emotions, and point of view type themes than she does actual people and events. The common problem I had with her stories was the overall feeling that nothing ever happened. Her characters needn't be named because they aren't nearly as important as whatever "point" she's trying to make about what they're going through (typically about the pressures of being a woman in this time frame), and ultimately the stories are boring. There's also very little universality or timelessness with her work. Jane Austin and Kate Chopin are two authors who also loved writing about the difficulties of being a woman in their time period. I'm not a big fan of either of theirs, but I would never consider their stories to be boring, per se. Their chracters still do things, go places, they show us what life was like for them in their time. It feels like Stafford was less interested in creating stories to show us something than she was in just telling us what she wanted us to know.
April 20, 2021
It's on its way courtesy of Amazon. Will start soon. ... And off we go last night with the intro by Joyce Carol Oates. Seems that Ms Stafford(born in Boulder & a fellow C.U. alum). Had a difficult life, which included multiple marriages, in particular an abusive one with Robert Lowell. A car wreck with him driving drunk resulted in some permanent disfigurement for her. She went ahead and married him anyway. Sigh ... As she got older she became more and more negative and difficult and very trying company for her friends. Sad ... didn't live that long either. Died in her mid-60's. So -
1 - Maggie Merriwether's Rich Experience - Can you say caustic????? JS lays waste to a bunch of upper-class wankers at a day-long party in France. Reminds me of Edward St. Aubyn.
2 - The Children's Game - a story discussed by JCO in the introduction. It's the "allure" of roulette, and the challenge of growing old ... and bored.
3 - The Echo and the Nemesis - so far all the stories have been set in Europe, and this one's no exception. The mostly normal, middle class and sane(but oh, so shy) Sue becomes pals with the oh so wealthy and crazy Ramona. Possibly the first fiction EVER to present an objective understanding of compulsive eating and food addiction.
4 - A Modest Proposal - JS borrows the title from Jonathan Swift for this bizarre tale of jaded hedonists in the Caribbean. The POSSIBILITY of child consumption does come up. Lots of booze in the stories of both Stafford and Cheever.
5 - Caveat Emptor - Turns out that the last thing a women's finishing college wants is to have any intellectuals on its faculty! JS doing a Dawn Powell on women's higher education of the pre-mid-20th c.
6 - Life Is No Abyss - A pungent visit to an old folks home with a dysfunctional(what else?) family.
7 - The Hope Chest - An interesting portrait of an isolated-interesting old woman in a cold world. So much of what makes Cheever-Porter-Stafford fun to read is not so much the "plots" they write, but simply the precise and poetic prose.
8 - Polite Conversation - Overbearing neighbors - when you move into their territory they expect you to play by their rules. People who get off on controlling and don't even realize it.
8 - A Country Love Story - tell of how a couple of outside and unwelcome issues afflict a middle-class/middle-aged marriage. Ms. Stafford keeps her focus sharp and relentless on the troubled wife, who seems to be at a loss.
9 - The Bleeding Heart - A very well written and unique kind of story about loneliness(I guess).
10 - The Lippia Lawn - A typical tour-de-force of writing by the author. What's is about? A meditation about something(s) … perhaps the author's own troubled mind.
11 - The Interior Castle - an inside out look on reconstructive nasal surgery. Not a bucket of fun and exceedingly well-crafted by JS, who is writing from her own experience. She was badly injured in a car accident caused by her drunken fiance' Robert Lowell. She married him anyway.
12 - The Healthiest Girl in Town - a more light-hearted tale than others previous, but not without a bit of bitterness. Based(I assume) on the time lived in Colorado in the author's childhood and youth. Boulder ... I remember when my family moved there in June of '57 I heard some mention of the folks who lived out west for their health. TB was the curse they were trying to unload. Some did, some didn't. The hospital where I worked for several years had once been a sanitorium(or is is sanitarium??? Mystery words ...
- lares, lavaliere, tule
13 - The Tea Time of Stouthearted Ladies - set in a Boulder-like college town near Denver in the Depression. Apparently Ms. Stafford's family was living in genteel(i.e. stressful, poverty). This story seems to be part of a collection(her second) that focuses on Ms. Stafford's Colorado time.
14 - The Mountain Day - I was cruising along liking pretty much all these stories when this one, rather long, popped up. At first it seemed kind of innocuous and "pretty," a young love story set against the beauty of Colorado's mountains. I was waiting for the "sting" to arrive and it did in the form of a gratuitously nasty ending. I don't really care about what Ms. Stafford might say about the point of the story, there's no need to cause the reader to throw up on the f'ing floor. A BAD story! From what I've read about her the author became increasingly unhappy and "difficult" as she got older. Her medical and marital issues weighed her spirit down I guess. Perhaps this story was a product of that time period.
- Wiki makes no mention of hellbenders living in Rocky Mountain environments.
15 - The Darkening Moon - Another well-written tale of nighttime mountain scares, probably drawn from the author's Colorado past.
16 - Bad Characters - Another Colorado tale, played strictly for laughs. A Chautauqua up on a hill is mentioned. That would be Boulder, but the town in the story is given the fictional name of Adams. Did Boulder ever have street cars? Yes!
17 - In the Zoo - Remembering an unhappy childhood - in Boulder, I assume.
- The Denver Zoo? Been there ...
18 - The Liberation - another Boulder/Adams story of the yearning to escape a straitjacket family and cultural environment. Interesting ... I liked Boulder so much when we moved there in 1957 and away from deep family troubles(alcoholism and divorce) in Massachusetts. That was about 20 years or so after JS left for the East. I'm sure it was true back then that Boulder lacked the cultural edge/sophistication of NYC. Even in the 50's it was still a pretty mid-western sort of burg, despite the presence of the university. Now? Quite different I suppose. I've only been back once since I moved away in 1982. Back east, of course, but that's another story ...
19 - A Reading Problem - The author re-visits her Boulder childhood in a more amusing than grim tale. For a change ... Very atmospheric for someone who's lived in Boulder. I actually pictured the spot where the narrator(as an eccentric young girl), in search of a peaceful place to read, winds up sitting by Boulder Creek(Adams in the story) on a warm, sunny day and being "bothered" by a father-daughter team of bedraggled evangelists selling "tonic." Very amusing and a great story.
- in one of the more recent stories JS mentions the name Emily Vanderpool. When I lived in Boulder in the 50's I had a classmate named Jim Vanderpool. Was Emily a fictional relative?
20 - A Summer Day - A standout story about the life of a young Indian orphan. Nor sure what the background is, but the prose is the usual excellence from JS.
21 - A Philosophy Lesson - Set at the university(CU - I assume), this one's a bit different. Art class - Drawing the Figure 101 or some such. The narrator(JS) is the nude model. And then ... The mystery of life and death and young adulthood.
22 - Children Are Bored on Sunday - I read this story when the NY'er reprinted it in a fairly recent edition. And ... it was that reading that propelled me to ordering this book and ... the collections by Cheever and K. A. Porter. All three are great books.
- An old note about JS' writing style. Heartfelt and sympathetic combined with sarcastic and discouraging.
23 - Beatrice Trueblood's Story - This could almost have been written by Cheever ... in a more direct and "serious" mood.
24 - Between the Porch and the Altar -
25 - I Love Someone -
26 - Cops and Robbers - Bears some resemblance to John Cheever's stuff.
27 - The Captain's Gift -
28 - The End of a Career - Seems like the stories nearer the end of Stafford's life have much to do with isolation and loneliness.
29 - An Influx of Poets - Supposedly this one had not been published before being included in this collection. Hmmm ... it could be because it's so obviously based on the author's relationship and marriage with Robert Lowell? Most, if not all these stories seem to be well-rooted in JS's own life. This one is no exception. It definitely makes Lowell(Tristram) seem like an ultra-jerk. BTW, this story concludes with disgusting some disgusting animal abuse/killing, sure to lower one's opinion of Stafford and Lowell(assuming it happened in real-life too). Curiously, my reading of it was the second time in just days that I encountered the identical abuse first in "The Glass Castle."
1 - Maggie Merriwether's Rich Experience - Can you say caustic????? JS lays waste to a bunch of upper-class wankers at a day-long party in France. Reminds me of Edward St. Aubyn.
2 - The Children's Game - a story discussed by JCO in the introduction. It's the "allure" of roulette, and the challenge of growing old ... and bored.
3 - The Echo and the Nemesis - so far all the stories have been set in Europe, and this one's no exception. The mostly normal, middle class and sane(but oh, so shy) Sue becomes pals with the oh so wealthy and crazy Ramona. Possibly the first fiction EVER to present an objective understanding of compulsive eating and food addiction.
4 - A Modest Proposal - JS borrows the title from Jonathan Swift for this bizarre tale of jaded hedonists in the Caribbean. The POSSIBILITY of child consumption does come up. Lots of booze in the stories of both Stafford and Cheever.
5 - Caveat Emptor - Turns out that the last thing a women's finishing college wants is to have any intellectuals on its faculty! JS doing a Dawn Powell on women's higher education of the pre-mid-20th c.
6 - Life Is No Abyss - A pungent visit to an old folks home with a dysfunctional(what else?) family.
7 - The Hope Chest - An interesting portrait of an isolated-interesting old woman in a cold world. So much of what makes Cheever-Porter-Stafford fun to read is not so much the "plots" they write, but simply the precise and poetic prose.
8 - Polite Conversation - Overbearing neighbors - when you move into their territory they expect you to play by their rules. People who get off on controlling and don't even realize it.
8 - A Country Love Story - tell of how a couple of outside and unwelcome issues afflict a middle-class/middle-aged marriage. Ms. Stafford keeps her focus sharp and relentless on the troubled wife, who seems to be at a loss.
9 - The Bleeding Heart - A very well written and unique kind of story about loneliness(I guess).
10 - The Lippia Lawn - A typical tour-de-force of writing by the author. What's is about? A meditation about something(s) … perhaps the author's own troubled mind.
11 - The Interior Castle - an inside out look on reconstructive nasal surgery. Not a bucket of fun and exceedingly well-crafted by JS, who is writing from her own experience. She was badly injured in a car accident caused by her drunken fiance' Robert Lowell. She married him anyway.
12 - The Healthiest Girl in Town - a more light-hearted tale than others previous, but not without a bit of bitterness. Based(I assume) on the time lived in Colorado in the author's childhood and youth. Boulder ... I remember when my family moved there in June of '57 I heard some mention of the folks who lived out west for their health. TB was the curse they were trying to unload. Some did, some didn't. The hospital where I worked for several years had once been a sanitorium(or is is sanitarium??? Mystery words ...
- lares, lavaliere, tule
13 - The Tea Time of Stouthearted Ladies - set in a Boulder-like college town near Denver in the Depression. Apparently Ms. Stafford's family was living in genteel(i.e. stressful, poverty). This story seems to be part of a collection(her second) that focuses on Ms. Stafford's Colorado time.
14 - The Mountain Day - I was cruising along liking pretty much all these stories when this one, rather long, popped up. At first it seemed kind of innocuous and "pretty," a young love story set against the beauty of Colorado's mountains. I was waiting for the "sting" to arrive and it did in the form of a gratuitously nasty ending. I don't really care about what Ms. Stafford might say about the point of the story, there's no need to cause the reader to throw up on the f'ing floor. A BAD story! From what I've read about her the author became increasingly unhappy and "difficult" as she got older. Her medical and marital issues weighed her spirit down I guess. Perhaps this story was a product of that time period.
- Wiki makes no mention of hellbenders living in Rocky Mountain environments.
15 - The Darkening Moon - Another well-written tale of nighttime mountain scares, probably drawn from the author's Colorado past.
16 - Bad Characters - Another Colorado tale, played strictly for laughs. A Chautauqua up on a hill is mentioned. That would be Boulder, but the town in the story is given the fictional name of Adams. Did Boulder ever have street cars? Yes!
17 - In the Zoo - Remembering an unhappy childhood - in Boulder, I assume.
- The Denver Zoo? Been there ...
18 - The Liberation - another Boulder/Adams story of the yearning to escape a straitjacket family and cultural environment. Interesting ... I liked Boulder so much when we moved there in 1957 and away from deep family troubles(alcoholism and divorce) in Massachusetts. That was about 20 years or so after JS left for the East. I'm sure it was true back then that Boulder lacked the cultural edge/sophistication of NYC. Even in the 50's it was still a pretty mid-western sort of burg, despite the presence of the university. Now? Quite different I suppose. I've only been back once since I moved away in 1982. Back east, of course, but that's another story ...
19 - A Reading Problem - The author re-visits her Boulder childhood in a more amusing than grim tale. For a change ... Very atmospheric for someone who's lived in Boulder. I actually pictured the spot where the narrator(as an eccentric young girl), in search of a peaceful place to read, winds up sitting by Boulder Creek(Adams in the story) on a warm, sunny day and being "bothered" by a father-daughter team of bedraggled evangelists selling "tonic." Very amusing and a great story.
- in one of the more recent stories JS mentions the name Emily Vanderpool. When I lived in Boulder in the 50's I had a classmate named Jim Vanderpool. Was Emily a fictional relative?
20 - A Summer Day - A standout story about the life of a young Indian orphan. Nor sure what the background is, but the prose is the usual excellence from JS.
21 - A Philosophy Lesson - Set at the university(CU - I assume), this one's a bit different. Art class - Drawing the Figure 101 or some such. The narrator(JS) is the nude model. And then ... The mystery of life and death and young adulthood.
22 - Children Are Bored on Sunday - I read this story when the NY'er reprinted it in a fairly recent edition. And ... it was that reading that propelled me to ordering this book and ... the collections by Cheever and K. A. Porter. All three are great books.
- An old note about JS' writing style. Heartfelt and sympathetic combined with sarcastic and discouraging.
23 - Beatrice Trueblood's Story - This could almost have been written by Cheever ... in a more direct and "serious" mood.
24 - Between the Porch and the Altar -
25 - I Love Someone -
26 - Cops and Robbers - Bears some resemblance to John Cheever's stuff.
27 - The Captain's Gift -
28 - The End of a Career - Seems like the stories nearer the end of Stafford's life have much to do with isolation and loneliness.
29 - An Influx of Poets - Supposedly this one had not been published before being included in this collection. Hmmm ... it could be because it's so obviously based on the author's relationship and marriage with Robert Lowell? Most, if not all these stories seem to be well-rooted in JS's own life. This one is no exception. It definitely makes Lowell(Tristram) seem like an ultra-jerk. BTW, this story concludes with disgusting some disgusting animal abuse/killing, sure to lower one's opinion of Stafford and Lowell(assuming it happened in real-life too). Curiously, my reading of it was the second time in just days that I encountered the identical abuse first in "The Glass Castle."
September 25, 2021
4.5/5
Acquiring works in the haphazard used fashion that I do means a risk of getting odd inclusions and exclusions as compared to the prettier hardcovers that tend to serve as a work's most popular edition, and it wasn't until I started skimming reviews after finishing this that I realized that my older copy didn't have "An Influx of Poets," a piece whose publication was put off possibly for including a tad too many innuendos as relating to a certain golden boy who drunk drove Stafford into a debilitating car accident and got a hugely positive and ten times as long Wikipedia article as compared to his first wife/divorce. So, for those of you looking for a "collected" that's a tad more but not totally "complete," be sure to take note of the table of contents, for while I can imagine how the story runs, I'm intensely annoyed by not being able to check for sure. You see, Stafford wasn't one to worry overly much about treading the same ground over and over again in different configurations of emotional fall and climactic rise, and the numerous appearances of a place called Adams, Colorado in one particular section that could be called the "Western" section as compared to the European, the Old Eastern, and the New Eastern is but one hint of such. For it didn't surprise me that Stafford had lived the story titled "The Interior Castle," for me the strongest piece in the entire collection, but not in the way that prevents practically every other story from holding their own in concert with each other. The fact that the edition doesn't accompany each piece with a year of composition and/or publication is a serious flaw, not in terms of my desiring to conjoin quality with chronological progression (while it is true that the most lately composed "The Philosophy Lesson" likely ranks just after TIC in sheer power, "The Lippia Lawn" of 1944 also has a peculiar power, aided perhaps by its comparatively unique subjective matter in conjunction with Stafford's customary analytical precision), but to trace certain arcs of happy ending versus sad, childhood in a tubercular vacation spot versus adulthood amongst the rich and politically grotesque, the anguish of being alone versus the danger of being known. If that doesn't sound like a good time, bear in mind that this is a reader with major depressive disorder talking about an author who most certainly also had major depressive disorder. When you get used to cupping happiness in the palm of your hand when everything below and above you is on fire, you tend to know your comrades for who they are, and to deny the resonance is about as productive as cutting off your nose to spite your face.
It seems, ever since certain writers spoke honestly about their experiences with rape, murder, childhood abuse, and whatever else finds its way into "transgressive" pieces, certain other writers have found it impossible to write narratives without haphazardly shoving such topics in for a quick and easy burst of "depth," invoking such only because, these days, it's deemed acceptable to invoke such if necessary. I'm not saying folks need to calm down and return to the days where everything beyond the quick walk in the street and the teatime on Sunday afternoons was heavily cloaked in innuendo and allusion, but it took reading Stafford's stories of vaguely haunted/put upon/silently suffering protagonists groping their way through cultural contexts and society oppressions and mostly downright unpleasant characters, but every so often a figure born of love, to find self contained worlds that didn't need to blow themselves apart in order to successfully tell a story. Like I said, I'm engaging with these on such a deeply personal level, born and bred on individual experience as well as the sort of white Anglo Saxon (missed out on the last part of the acronym due to some sort of Catholic heritage) "norms" that I usually heavily deride, that I hardly expect everyone, much less more than a few, to get through thirty stories in just under 500, or thirty-one in just over 500, pages of a tightly controlled, exquisitely contextualized, but still rather maudlinly despondent and sometimes overly repetitive when all the stories are strung together style of writing and love it for what it is. I won't even deny the rather vicious moments of antiblackness and racism, however much certain instances could easily be waved away by mutters of "good intentions" and "back in those days." However, I will say that, for once, the Pulitzer somehow didn't screw up.
In terms of other stories that stood out, "The Maiden" and "The Captain's Gift" both have enjoyable menacing twists, while "A Reading Problem" and "Children Are Bored on Sunday" are both rather heartwarming in a quietly lovely way. "The Healthiest Girl in Town" has the engagingly morbid tinge to it of the better Tim Burton works, and pieces such as "The Tea Time of Stouthearted Ladies", "The Bleeding Heart", and "Caveat Emptor" waver on the knifepoint that is gutpunch satire, caught between laugh out loud and devastating unease. In terms of stories that fall short, I have my doubts as to whether "A Modest Proposal" or "A Summer Day" justify the time it took to compose them, while anything else I didn't mention either didn't strongly resonate, or was too close in content and theme to a number of stories to bear mentioning. It's eerie how, after a while, I could get a sense of when Stafford too early and for too long gave into pathos or piled on the trite turn of phrase a bit too cleanly at the stereotypical note, and it is mostly for discerning at what period in her life she was trying this or that that I desire a more stringent chronology of short story publication than I have so far come across. All in all, it's not often that one finds oneself riding along on the pulse point of a writer's craft enough to cheer them on when they pull that difficult stretch of phrase at the vital moment and pat them on the back while telling them next time when a particular effort falls mundanely flat. When it does, it's best to pay attention.
She would be free, it is true, to walk once again in the parts of the town and the country she had enjoyed before but this gain was offset by the knowledge that there was no mystery left: she knew exactly where the man lived and, moreover, to her regret, she knew how he lived.Colson Whitehead once said, "I could have written about upper middle class white people who feel sad sometimes, but there’s a lot of competition." If you're expecting these stories to be anything but that, biased slightly towards the viewpoint of that construction known as "female," you're going to be sorely disappointed. On the other side of the coin, if you're only here on the tail of that whole lot of the Lowells, the Hardwicks, the Blackwoods, and whoever else included in that list that the NYRB Classics imprint has been going down for the last two decades, you'd do us all a favor and stop conflating a voyeuristic obsession with where a historical person's genitals have purportedly been with genuine interest in their creative output. Depriving a reader of both angles, the "universal" and the "referential," is probably the worst possible way to advertise a work to an unknowing potential, but frankly, I'd like to think that I'd culled the last of the "friends" who were here solely for watching the ads I put out several years ago, so whoever's left is interesting in reading, rather than reading the "right" things. Beyond my influence, this work will get its share of those who trawl through the Pulitzers, the Bookers, the whatever other Euro/Neo-Euro evocations of highfalutin unctuousness are in vogue at time, but I'm sure the fact that Stafford was a white woman who had the unconscionable temerity to not only resist killing herself by resorting to such "unfeminine" means as drug abuse and fraught domestic relationships, but to also convey quite a bit of such through her writing, means that certain folks won't feel the need to cross examine themselves into a pristine five star rating. As for me, as always, I reserve the right to sink the rating down later on, but for now, I think about the clawing desire to know more of Stafford, through fiction or otherwise, than what non-paywalled resources can give me, and I acknowledge that the least as I can do is to portray those drives accurately.
Acquiring works in the haphazard used fashion that I do means a risk of getting odd inclusions and exclusions as compared to the prettier hardcovers that tend to serve as a work's most popular edition, and it wasn't until I started skimming reviews after finishing this that I realized that my older copy didn't have "An Influx of Poets," a piece whose publication was put off possibly for including a tad too many innuendos as relating to a certain golden boy who drunk drove Stafford into a debilitating car accident and got a hugely positive and ten times as long Wikipedia article as compared to his first wife/divorce. So, for those of you looking for a "collected" that's a tad more but not totally "complete," be sure to take note of the table of contents, for while I can imagine how the story runs, I'm intensely annoyed by not being able to check for sure. You see, Stafford wasn't one to worry overly much about treading the same ground over and over again in different configurations of emotional fall and climactic rise, and the numerous appearances of a place called Adams, Colorado in one particular section that could be called the "Western" section as compared to the European, the Old Eastern, and the New Eastern is but one hint of such. For it didn't surprise me that Stafford had lived the story titled "The Interior Castle," for me the strongest piece in the entire collection, but not in the way that prevents practically every other story from holding their own in concert with each other. The fact that the edition doesn't accompany each piece with a year of composition and/or publication is a serious flaw, not in terms of my desiring to conjoin quality with chronological progression (while it is true that the most lately composed "The Philosophy Lesson" likely ranks just after TIC in sheer power, "The Lippia Lawn" of 1944 also has a peculiar power, aided perhaps by its comparatively unique subjective matter in conjunction with Stafford's customary analytical precision), but to trace certain arcs of happy ending versus sad, childhood in a tubercular vacation spot versus adulthood amongst the rich and politically grotesque, the anguish of being alone versus the danger of being known. If that doesn't sound like a good time, bear in mind that this is a reader with major depressive disorder talking about an author who most certainly also had major depressive disorder. When you get used to cupping happiness in the palm of your hand when everything below and above you is on fire, you tend to know your comrades for who they are, and to deny the resonance is about as productive as cutting off your nose to spite your face.
It seems, ever since certain writers spoke honestly about their experiences with rape, murder, childhood abuse, and whatever else finds its way into "transgressive" pieces, certain other writers have found it impossible to write narratives without haphazardly shoving such topics in for a quick and easy burst of "depth," invoking such only because, these days, it's deemed acceptable to invoke such if necessary. I'm not saying folks need to calm down and return to the days where everything beyond the quick walk in the street and the teatime on Sunday afternoons was heavily cloaked in innuendo and allusion, but it took reading Stafford's stories of vaguely haunted/put upon/silently suffering protagonists groping their way through cultural contexts and society oppressions and mostly downright unpleasant characters, but every so often a figure born of love, to find self contained worlds that didn't need to blow themselves apart in order to successfully tell a story. Like I said, I'm engaging with these on such a deeply personal level, born and bred on individual experience as well as the sort of white Anglo Saxon (missed out on the last part of the acronym due to some sort of Catholic heritage) "norms" that I usually heavily deride, that I hardly expect everyone, much less more than a few, to get through thirty stories in just under 500, or thirty-one in just over 500, pages of a tightly controlled, exquisitely contextualized, but still rather maudlinly despondent and sometimes overly repetitive when all the stories are strung together style of writing and love it for what it is. I won't even deny the rather vicious moments of antiblackness and racism, however much certain instances could easily be waved away by mutters of "good intentions" and "back in those days." However, I will say that, for once, the Pulitzer somehow didn't screw up.
In terms of other stories that stood out, "The Maiden" and "The Captain's Gift" both have enjoyable menacing twists, while "A Reading Problem" and "Children Are Bored on Sunday" are both rather heartwarming in a quietly lovely way. "The Healthiest Girl in Town" has the engagingly morbid tinge to it of the better Tim Burton works, and pieces such as "The Tea Time of Stouthearted Ladies", "The Bleeding Heart", and "Caveat Emptor" waver on the knifepoint that is gutpunch satire, caught between laugh out loud and devastating unease. In terms of stories that fall short, I have my doubts as to whether "A Modest Proposal" or "A Summer Day" justify the time it took to compose them, while anything else I didn't mention either didn't strongly resonate, or was too close in content and theme to a number of stories to bear mentioning. It's eerie how, after a while, I could get a sense of when Stafford too early and for too long gave into pathos or piled on the trite turn of phrase a bit too cleanly at the stereotypical note, and it is mostly for discerning at what period in her life she was trying this or that that I desire a more stringent chronology of short story publication than I have so far come across. All in all, it's not often that one finds oneself riding along on the pulse point of a writer's craft enough to cheer them on when they pull that difficult stretch of phrase at the vital moment and pat them on the back while telling them next time when a particular effort falls mundanely flat. When it does, it's best to pay attention.
And they had been too busy honoring their family to love it, too busy defending the West even to look at it.
January 31, 2012
Although I tend to gravitate toward big, meaty novels when I look for something to read, I am in awe of short story writers. To be able to weave an entire story in only 10 or 15 pages (sometimes less) that leaves the reader feeling completely satisfied is just amazing.
Jean Stafford is a master at this - she can sketch a complete scene is just a few well-chosen words. She also had me reaching for the dictionary, which I love - nothing like adding a few new words to my Scrabble vocabulary! Stafford's descriptions of social settings - both high society and low - are beautifully done throughout the various sections of the book.
I read one of her most well-known stories, In the Zoo last night. What an ending - it left me shaking my head both at the storyline and at Stafford's skill as a writer. The Echo and The Nemesis was another story where the ending had an unexpected twist - again, just a few brief words but they left you shaken. In The Healthiest Girl in Town her depiction of the main character's childhood anxiety and thoughts were wonderful, and marked with Stafford's wry humor.
I think most everyone would enjoy at least some of the stories in this collection. Not every one is a diamond, but all of them are jewels in their own way. I think Stafford is one of the "must read" authors, especially for anyone who has to do much writing of their own (for any reason) - you can learn a lot about good, concise writing from her work.
Jean Stafford is a master at this - she can sketch a complete scene is just a few well-chosen words. She also had me reaching for the dictionary, which I love - nothing like adding a few new words to my Scrabble vocabulary! Stafford's descriptions of social settings - both high society and low - are beautifully done throughout the various sections of the book.
I read one of her most well-known stories, In the Zoo last night. What an ending - it left me shaking my head both at the storyline and at Stafford's skill as a writer. The Echo and The Nemesis was another story where the ending had an unexpected twist - again, just a few brief words but they left you shaken. In The Healthiest Girl in Town her depiction of the main character's childhood anxiety and thoughts were wonderful, and marked with Stafford's wry humor.
I think most everyone would enjoy at least some of the stories in this collection. Not every one is a diamond, but all of them are jewels in their own way. I think Stafford is one of the "must read" authors, especially for anyone who has to do much writing of their own (for any reason) - you can learn a lot about good, concise writing from her work.
September 9, 2011
What an unusual bunch of short stories Jean Stafford has come up with!
First and foremost, to give credit where it is due, this is because Stafford's writing-style is so remarkable -- each sentence is rich with intelligent words and beautiful phrases strung together in a prose that is overflowing with symbolism and meaning, and which often surprises you with a sharp, unexpected uppercut of laugh-out-loud wit, right in the middle of the most dire and dark tales.
Sure, much of these stories are dense and challenging to read and understand, usually because Stafford's vocabulary knows no bounds, but each tale is still magnificent. And the stories that are simpler to breeze through are just as intellectual, just as deep, and just as powerful as the ones which take a bit more time to trod through.
Often hilarious, often sad, often disturbing, very often ambiguous, but always thought-provoking, Stafford's tales are all about people suffering from loneliness or the desire to fit in, and who, in the process, are on the brink of madness. Her characters always, inevitably lash out or break down in their [usually unsuccessful] quests for happiness, but we come to recognize that they are perhaps no more crazy than the rest of the population with which they surround themselves: perhaps "normal" or "happy" people are just as insane as Stafford's protagonists, but these outsiders will always stand out for being different from the status quo.
"The Collected Stories of Jean Stafford" is divided into four sections: stories of Americans living abroad; of people in Boston; of people in the Midwest; and of people in Manhattan. The vast majority of these characters are women, and the age range is limitless -- she writes about young children and the elderly and everyone in between. Her stance as a feminist writer is clear, regardless of what age of the woman she is writing about, or in what location she may be; indeed, every different age and every different location (and every different marital status, every different social level, and many other demographics) allow Stafford to continually examine the feminist cause from a plethora of different angles. Her prose is always intent on destroying feminine stereotypes, and her symbolism tries to abolish gender roles, but it is never done lazily or in an overtly obvious manner: it's with subtlety and intelligence and originality and imagination, and as a result, I'm sure I missed some of the finer points along the way, but I loved the book - and each individual story - anyway.
There are over 30 stories in this collection, and each one, in its own way, gave me quite a bit to ponder over. It's a terrific book which, deservedly, won Ms. Stafford a Pulitzer Prize.
First and foremost, to give credit where it is due, this is because Stafford's writing-style is so remarkable -- each sentence is rich with intelligent words and beautiful phrases strung together in a prose that is overflowing with symbolism and meaning, and which often surprises you with a sharp, unexpected uppercut of laugh-out-loud wit, right in the middle of the most dire and dark tales.
Sure, much of these stories are dense and challenging to read and understand, usually because Stafford's vocabulary knows no bounds, but each tale is still magnificent. And the stories that are simpler to breeze through are just as intellectual, just as deep, and just as powerful as the ones which take a bit more time to trod through.
Often hilarious, often sad, often disturbing, very often ambiguous, but always thought-provoking, Stafford's tales are all about people suffering from loneliness or the desire to fit in, and who, in the process, are on the brink of madness. Her characters always, inevitably lash out or break down in their [usually unsuccessful] quests for happiness, but we come to recognize that they are perhaps no more crazy than the rest of the population with which they surround themselves: perhaps "normal" or "happy" people are just as insane as Stafford's protagonists, but these outsiders will always stand out for being different from the status quo.
"The Collected Stories of Jean Stafford" is divided into four sections: stories of Americans living abroad; of people in Boston; of people in the Midwest; and of people in Manhattan. The vast majority of these characters are women, and the age range is limitless -- she writes about young children and the elderly and everyone in between. Her stance as a feminist writer is clear, regardless of what age of the woman she is writing about, or in what location she may be; indeed, every different age and every different location (and every different marital status, every different social level, and many other demographics) allow Stafford to continually examine the feminist cause from a plethora of different angles. Her prose is always intent on destroying feminine stereotypes, and her symbolism tries to abolish gender roles, but it is never done lazily or in an overtly obvious manner: it's with subtlety and intelligence and originality and imagination, and as a result, I'm sure I missed some of the finer points along the way, but I loved the book - and each individual story - anyway.
There are over 30 stories in this collection, and each one, in its own way, gave me quite a bit to ponder over. It's a terrific book which, deservedly, won Ms. Stafford a Pulitzer Prize.
July 12, 2009
Her stories remind me of a crisp autumn day, where everything is beautiful but twisted and cold and dying at the same time. It’s my favorite kind of weather. Most of all I love “Children Are Bored On Sunday," which makes me miss autumn in New York. The season, not the terrible, horrible, no-good, very bad movie.
July 12, 2021
Ka-pow! Nicely done, Mrs. Spencer. And I really liked it, too.
January 8, 2024
My response to this collection is: Meh. Before beginning it, as part of my personal Pulitzer Prize winners challenge, I assumed that, even though I couldn’t recall reading any stories by Jean Stafford, I would surely run into one or two or several that I had, in fact, read and admired at some point in the past. Nope. Unlike the superb Pulitzer Prize winning short story collections by Katherine Anne Porter, John Cheever, or Jhumpa Lahiri, there’s nothing about this collection that stands out as distinctive or memorable, which is no doubt why I’ve never seen any of them reprinted in any anthology. Notably, the collection won the prize for fiction from the same year that Slaughterhouse Five was published. Huge mistake.
So it goes.
The best story in the collection, in my opinion, and the only one that is likely to stick in my memory more than a week, is “Bad Characters,” told from the point of view of an eleven-year-old girl with the bad habit of alienating her only friend (a series of them) because she suddenly decides she wants to be alone: “it was always my fault; I would swear vilely in front of a girl I knew to be pious and prim (by the time I was eight, the most grandiloquent gangster could have added nothing to my vocabulary—I had an awful tongue), or I would call a Tenderfoot Scout a sissy or make fun of athletics to the daughter of the high-school coach.” I instantly liked this kid! One day, when Emily is alone in the house because she is between friends, another eleven-year-old girl breaks into the house to steal a cake, and Emily is fascinated: “Lottie Jump was certainly nothing to look at. She was tall and made of skin and bones; she was evilly ugly, and her clothes were a disgrace, not just ill-fitting and old and ragged but dirty, unmentionably so; clearly she did not wash much or brush her teeth, which were notched like a saw and small and brown (it crossed my mind that perhaps she chewed tobacco); her long, lank hair looked as if it might have nits. But she had personality. She made me think of one of those self-contained dogs whose home is where his handout is and who travels alone but, if it suits him to, will become leader of a pack.” Lottie persuades Emily to join her at the five and dime to “lift,” i.e. shoplift. Emily objects that stealing is a sin, but “’Ish ka bibble! I should worry if it’s a sin or not,’ said Lottie with a shrug. ‘And they’ll never put a smart old whatsis like _me_ in jail. It’s fun, stealing is—it’s a picnic.’” The climax of the story is when Emily has one of her impulses to be alone right in the middle of the girls’ lifting excursion, with somewhat unpredictable results.
In general, the most effective stories, for me anyway, were those told from a child’s point of view, though none was as effective as “Bad Characters.” I was mostly left cold by the many stories set in Europe or in New York or its wealthy suburbs, among people who were, frankly snobs, though there are a lot of snobbish characters, including, to be sure, Emily of “Bad Characters.” Are we supposed to realize they’re snobs and dislike them for that, or is Stafford a snob? Honestly, I couldn’t tell.
Likewise, I was unsure about the gender politics. Another story I sort of liked was “Beatrice Trueblood’s Story,” which concerns a woman who suddenly goes deaf after tiring of the “incessant wrangle” with her “insufferable” fiancé: “all of a sudden I thought, I cannot and I will not listen to another word.” Pretty clearly, I think, a statement about dealing with “insufferable” men by refusing to listen to them. Cool—except the story over all doesn’t go much of anywhere. The final story of the collection, “The End of a Career,” focuses on a woman whose only “career” is to be beautiful, and who develops neither much personality or, frankly, much of a story. Her tragedy, I guess, is that she gets old, which makes her miserable. Supposedly if she could experience love, that would solve her problem, but I guess I’m not persuaded that improves the gender politics of the whole thing.
On top of it all, the style of the stories is, for the most part, not terribly impressive, though there is the occasional effective phrase, like the description of an irascible looking gambler who “wore his monocle like a reprimand.”
This is now several Pulitzers in a row that have disappointed me. I’m hoping some of the upcoming ones will be better.
Poo-tee-weet?
So it goes.
The best story in the collection, in my opinion, and the only one that is likely to stick in my memory more than a week, is “Bad Characters,” told from the point of view of an eleven-year-old girl with the bad habit of alienating her only friend (a series of them) because she suddenly decides she wants to be alone: “it was always my fault; I would swear vilely in front of a girl I knew to be pious and prim (by the time I was eight, the most grandiloquent gangster could have added nothing to my vocabulary—I had an awful tongue), or I would call a Tenderfoot Scout a sissy or make fun of athletics to the daughter of the high-school coach.” I instantly liked this kid! One day, when Emily is alone in the house because she is between friends, another eleven-year-old girl breaks into the house to steal a cake, and Emily is fascinated: “Lottie Jump was certainly nothing to look at. She was tall and made of skin and bones; she was evilly ugly, and her clothes were a disgrace, not just ill-fitting and old and ragged but dirty, unmentionably so; clearly she did not wash much or brush her teeth, which were notched like a saw and small and brown (it crossed my mind that perhaps she chewed tobacco); her long, lank hair looked as if it might have nits. But she had personality. She made me think of one of those self-contained dogs whose home is where his handout is and who travels alone but, if it suits him to, will become leader of a pack.” Lottie persuades Emily to join her at the five and dime to “lift,” i.e. shoplift. Emily objects that stealing is a sin, but “’Ish ka bibble! I should worry if it’s a sin or not,’ said Lottie with a shrug. ‘And they’ll never put a smart old whatsis like _me_ in jail. It’s fun, stealing is—it’s a picnic.’” The climax of the story is when Emily has one of her impulses to be alone right in the middle of the girls’ lifting excursion, with somewhat unpredictable results.
In general, the most effective stories, for me anyway, were those told from a child’s point of view, though none was as effective as “Bad Characters.” I was mostly left cold by the many stories set in Europe or in New York or its wealthy suburbs, among people who were, frankly snobs, though there are a lot of snobbish characters, including, to be sure, Emily of “Bad Characters.” Are we supposed to realize they’re snobs and dislike them for that, or is Stafford a snob? Honestly, I couldn’t tell.
Likewise, I was unsure about the gender politics. Another story I sort of liked was “Beatrice Trueblood’s Story,” which concerns a woman who suddenly goes deaf after tiring of the “incessant wrangle” with her “insufferable” fiancé: “all of a sudden I thought, I cannot and I will not listen to another word.” Pretty clearly, I think, a statement about dealing with “insufferable” men by refusing to listen to them. Cool—except the story over all doesn’t go much of anywhere. The final story of the collection, “The End of a Career,” focuses on a woman whose only “career” is to be beautiful, and who develops neither much personality or, frankly, much of a story. Her tragedy, I guess, is that she gets old, which makes her miserable. Supposedly if she could experience love, that would solve her problem, but I guess I’m not persuaded that improves the gender politics of the whole thing.
On top of it all, the style of the stories is, for the most part, not terribly impressive, though there is the occasional effective phrase, like the description of an irascible looking gambler who “wore his monocle like a reprimand.”
This is now several Pulitzers in a row that have disappointed me. I’m hoping some of the upcoming ones will be better.
Poo-tee-weet?
April 21, 2016
Very easy to read, I found I enjoyed reading these stories though I can't honestly tell you why, or even describe a single character or event. By no means a page turner, i didnt feel the need to find out what happened next because the plots were so mild that it lmost seemed that nothing happened. Yet, it is so smoothly written that I didnt find it boring. Although I had no problem setting it down I didn't mind picking it up again and wandering back into Stafford's world. What I did find however, is that her stories though not unpleasant were almost entirely forgettable for me. Not only was I generally uninterested in the characters, but I could not say what a single story was about after reading it. I wouldn't say that the writing was boring, just not exceptionally interesting....or exceptionally anything.
January 26, 2009
Before I read this, I thought Jean Stafford just wrote stories about society parties where vapid people say horrendous things and a select few see through them and are branded as outsiders (and narrators). And those are her best stories. But she also wrote about kids growing up in the West and all sorts of social awkwardness found outside of society parties, too. A good 75% of these stories are best described as "painful," but they're pretty wonderful, too.
October 30, 2015
“Of course it could not have happened like this: falling in love is not an abrupt plunge; it is a gradual descent, seldom in a straight line, rather like the floating downward of a parachute.” (from "Caveat Emptor")
Jean Stafford: A forgotten American treasure. These are charming stories, bursting with vitality. I wonder why she has more or less faded into oblivion; it is not fair.
Jean Stafford: A forgotten American treasure. These are charming stories, bursting with vitality. I wonder why she has more or less faded into oblivion; it is not fair.
July 16, 2024
First, for the record, I have to say that I think it is preposterous for the Pulitzer committee to lavish its annual prize on a massive volume of short stories, as it did for Katherine Anne Porter, John Cheever, and Jean Stafford. The point of the award, as I understand it, is to recognize individual literary achievements, not whole careers, and while the rules might not specifically exclude collections of stories written and published over decades, awarding such tomes runs contrary to the spirit and purpose of the award. The Pulitzers might as well have given their prize to the collected Nathanial Hawthorne, though he was long dead by the time the prize was founded.
Now that I have dispensed with that complaint, which is about the Pulitzer Prizes, not Jean Stafford, I have a few words to say about the book. Mostly, it is very good. Stafford has an excellent eye for detail, writes shockingly beautiful sentences, and employs a sumptuous and enviable vocabulary. Typically, her protagonists enter into and/or try to escape from closed-off spaces/institutions like family homes, boarding schools, sanatoriums, and asylums, where they are restricted or ridiculed on account of their class, gender, youth, artistic sensibilities, etc. Often, the antagonists (the ones doing the restricting and ridiculing) are what we might recognize today as narcissists, and I think a person could write a great dissertation or book about Stafford’s psychological penetration, if that has not been done already. (Surely it has been done already?) If the stories eventually feel a little repetitive, I suppose that is probably just the consequence of how they are presented here. Five hundred pages of short stories by any single author are a lot to read, no matter how perceptive and stylish an author she might be.
Now that I have dispensed with that complaint, which is about the Pulitzer Prizes, not Jean Stafford, I have a few words to say about the book. Mostly, it is very good. Stafford has an excellent eye for detail, writes shockingly beautiful sentences, and employs a sumptuous and enviable vocabulary. Typically, her protagonists enter into and/or try to escape from closed-off spaces/institutions like family homes, boarding schools, sanatoriums, and asylums, where they are restricted or ridiculed on account of their class, gender, youth, artistic sensibilities, etc. Often, the antagonists (the ones doing the restricting and ridiculing) are what we might recognize today as narcissists, and I think a person could write a great dissertation or book about Stafford’s psychological penetration, if that has not been done already. (Surely it has been done already?) If the stories eventually feel a little repetitive, I suppose that is probably just the consequence of how they are presented here. Five hundred pages of short stories by any single author are a lot to read, no matter how perceptive and stylish an author she might be.
July 25, 2018
This was a remarkable book of stories. Some better than others, all better than most stories you will ever read by other people. Her precise and exceptional vocabulary, her wicked humor, the way she could actually stab you in the heart with a throwaway line, all of this I will never forget. At a certain point, maybe halfway through the book, I pretty much wanted it to be the book I just keep reading for the rest of my life. I am so glad I read this book. I'm so sorry it's over.
July 22, 2018
This book won the Pulitzer Prize in 1970. The author, Jean Stafford, has put together a collection on 30 short stories. I enjoyed many stories but some were a bit difficult to follow. This book will also improve your vocabulary as it is laced with words not commonly used in other works of literature I have read. Keep your Webster's dictionary handy. I give this book 3 stars.
October 16, 2022
Some really solid short stories in this collection. I don’t know that I would recommend the audio version as the transitions between stories was nonexistent. It was sometimes hard to tell a new story had started.
March 1, 2025
These stories can be dense but they’re clear and exceedingly smart, and sometimes even lightly funny (like the frog who croaks “Gerlash” in “A Reading Problem).
June 7, 2025
One more done on my Pulitzer Prize Reading Goal. Not bad but kind of morose and melancholy.
April 13, 2020
The most recent of the Pulitzer winners i have read with my husband - this one was fantastic. All short stories, and Jean Stafford has a remarkable vocabulary and a fantastic talent in using a;; those wonderful words. We had to refer to a dictionary during virtually every story. Absolutely loved this book, as did my husband.
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September 30, 2019I read this book.
November 18, 2025
I have not looked up so many vocabulary words since reading Joyce’s “Ulysses”, but I was up for the challenge and enjoyed the learning that came with the definitions.
Jean writes with confidence but not arrogance. I sense that she is sharing the story with the reader and not talking down to him or showing off. Also, as has been observed by others, her use of language has laser-like precision, making it stimulating and satisfying to read. Some passages go beyond that even and are just gobsmackingly good.
My favorite stories are:
The Mountain Day
Bad Characters
The Liberation
A Reading Problem
Beatrice’s Trueblood’s Story
The End of a Career
Jean writes with confidence but not arrogance. I sense that she is sharing the story with the reader and not talking down to him or showing off. Also, as has been observed by others, her use of language has laser-like precision, making it stimulating and satisfying to read. Some passages go beyond that even and are just gobsmackingly good.
My favorite stories are:
The Mountain Day
Bad Characters
The Liberation
A Reading Problem
Beatrice’s Trueblood’s Story
The End of a Career
August 8, 2020
This review is for an anthology of Jean Stafford's short fiction that includes works printed elsewhere.
The Interior Castle. Have you ever read something that describes an experience that you have never had but strikes you as so unmistakably authentic that you know the author lived it? While some of this short story was fictional, such as the isolation and anonymity of the protagonist, I was moved immediately after reading it to research Jean Stafford's biography. Sure enough, the incident and aftermath featured in the story occurred in Ms. Stafford's life. Her powers of description cannot be praised strongly enough, in my view. To be brought to a vantage where such alien morbidity can be viewed between the gaps of the fingers covering your eyes is the work of a magician.
Other great Stafford stories include Bad Characters, where we meet the impetuous Emily Vanderpool, The Maiden, A Modest Proposal, Life is No Abyss, A Reading Problem (Emily meets some scoundrel evangelists).
Bad Characters was the first Jean Stafford story I read many years ago, and it remains a favorite. Here Stafford conjures up Lottie Jump, a child outlaw from Oklahoma who knew no games but was best amused by 'lifting' things, described by eleven year-old Emily Vanderpool, whose house Lottie had just invaded: "Lottie Jump was certainly nothing to look at. She was tall and made of skin and bones; she was evilly ugly, and her clothes were a disgrace, not just ill-fitting and old and ragged but dirty, unmentionably so; clearly she did not wash much or brush her teeth, which were notched like a saw, and small and brown (it crossed my mind that perhaps she chewed tobacco); her long, lank hair looked as if it might have nits. But she had personality....Her smile was the smile of a jack-o'-lantern--high, wide, and handsome. When it was over, no trace of it remained...She gave me a long appraising look. Her eyes were the color of mud." Can you see her yet?
And here, describing the indolent observations of a young divorcee-in-process waiting out a six-week quarantine for respectability on a Caribbean island (Haiti, anyone know? story published in 1949): "...this two-dimensional and too pellucid world seemed all the world; it was not possible to envisage another landscape, even when she closed her eyes and called to mind the sober countryside of Massachusetts under snow, for the tropics trespassed, overran, and spoiled the image with their heavy, heady smells and their wanton colors. She could not gain the decorous smell of pine forests when the smell of night-blooming cereus was so arrogant in her memory; it had clung and cloyed since the evening before, like a mouthful of bad candy. Nor was it possible to imagine another time than this very afternoon, and it was as if the clocks, like the winds, had been arrested, and all endeavor were ended and all passion were a fait accompli, for nothing could strive or love in a torpor so insentient." It takes my breath away.
The Interior Castle. Have you ever read something that describes an experience that you have never had but strikes you as so unmistakably authentic that you know the author lived it? While some of this short story was fictional, such as the isolation and anonymity of the protagonist, I was moved immediately after reading it to research Jean Stafford's biography. Sure enough, the incident and aftermath featured in the story occurred in Ms. Stafford's life. Her powers of description cannot be praised strongly enough, in my view. To be brought to a vantage where such alien morbidity can be viewed between the gaps of the fingers covering your eyes is the work of a magician.
Other great Stafford stories include Bad Characters, where we meet the impetuous Emily Vanderpool, The Maiden, A Modest Proposal, Life is No Abyss, A Reading Problem (Emily meets some scoundrel evangelists).
Bad Characters was the first Jean Stafford story I read many years ago, and it remains a favorite. Here Stafford conjures up Lottie Jump, a child outlaw from Oklahoma who knew no games but was best amused by 'lifting' things, described by eleven year-old Emily Vanderpool, whose house Lottie had just invaded: "Lottie Jump was certainly nothing to look at. She was tall and made of skin and bones; she was evilly ugly, and her clothes were a disgrace, not just ill-fitting and old and ragged but dirty, unmentionably so; clearly she did not wash much or brush her teeth, which were notched like a saw, and small and brown (it crossed my mind that perhaps she chewed tobacco); her long, lank hair looked as if it might have nits. But she had personality....Her smile was the smile of a jack-o'-lantern--high, wide, and handsome. When it was over, no trace of it remained...She gave me a long appraising look. Her eyes were the color of mud." Can you see her yet?
And here, describing the indolent observations of a young divorcee-in-process waiting out a six-week quarantine for respectability on a Caribbean island (Haiti, anyone know? story published in 1949): "...this two-dimensional and too pellucid world seemed all the world; it was not possible to envisage another landscape, even when she closed her eyes and called to mind the sober countryside of Massachusetts under snow, for the tropics trespassed, overran, and spoiled the image with their heavy, heady smells and their wanton colors. She could not gain the decorous smell of pine forests when the smell of night-blooming cereus was so arrogant in her memory; it had clung and cloyed since the evening before, like a mouthful of bad candy. Nor was it possible to imagine another time than this very afternoon, and it was as if the clocks, like the winds, had been arrested, and all endeavor were ended and all passion were a fait accompli, for nothing could strive or love in a torpor so insentient." It takes my breath away.
March 17, 2008
Updated review: 3/16/2008
Well, I've read about 80% of these stories by now, and I think it's time to move on. As the two paragraphs below suggest, I think the stories are well-written, but suffer from an almost clinical detachment on the author's part. So, only three stars.
Interim review:
I've been dipping into this collection sporadically over the last month or so, and my reaction is ambivalent. I admire these stories a lot - insert appropriate verbiage along the lines of 'tightly constructed', 'keen eye', 'extraordinary evocation of a sense of place', the usual nuggets of reviewer approval. yes, indeedy, ms Stafford sure can write. Yada, yada.
So why don't I enjoy these stories more? Why does it feel like more of a chore than a pleasure to return to this collection? Maybe it has something to do with the author's detachment towards her characters. If she liked them a little more, maybe I would like these stories a little better.
Well, I've read about 80% of these stories by now, and I think it's time to move on. As the two paragraphs below suggest, I think the stories are well-written, but suffer from an almost clinical detachment on the author's part. So, only three stars.
Interim review:
I've been dipping into this collection sporadically over the last month or so, and my reaction is ambivalent. I admire these stories a lot - insert appropriate verbiage along the lines of 'tightly constructed', 'keen eye', 'extraordinary evocation of a sense of place', the usual nuggets of reviewer approval. yes, indeedy, ms Stafford sure can write. Yada, yada.
So why don't I enjoy these stories more? Why does it feel like more of a chore than a pleasure to return to this collection? Maybe it has something to do with the author's detachment towards her characters. If she liked them a little more, maybe I would like these stories a little better.
July 3, 2018
I just finished reading Katherine Anne Porters sensational short story collection and wanted to continue reading more of the same and Jean Stafford came through for me. Her writing style is quite different from Porters but is still quite good. Porter has a very unique style whereas Stafford has a more traditional style but is still very lyrical. Porters writing tends to be a bit more as an observer to the story where Stafford tends to be more intimate like a participant. The writing is fantastic in both books and I would highly recommend either book to anyone interested in short stories.
January 11, 2021
It’s currently the 11th of January, and this is my 5th finish of the year.
So, I am not a slow reader by any means.
However; this cacophony of nonsense took me over a year to complete. Had it not stood in the way of me progressing towards my goal of reading all the Pulitzer Prize fiction winners, I would have thrown this away months ago.
The pages are filled with story after story of dull people leading dull lives who then realize that they live dull meaningless lives, over and over and over again.
There’s no use wasting your time here. Pick literally anything else to read.
So, I am not a slow reader by any means.
However; this cacophony of nonsense took me over a year to complete. Had it not stood in the way of me progressing towards my goal of reading all the Pulitzer Prize fiction winners, I would have thrown this away months ago.
The pages are filled with story after story of dull people leading dull lives who then realize that they live dull meaningless lives, over and over and over again.
There’s no use wasting your time here. Pick literally anything else to read.
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