The Collected Stories of Katherine Anne Porter

Gathered here is the life's work of one of the finest short story writers America has produced, a body of fiction so exacting that Porter published fewer than thirty stories across four decades and let not one of them go until it was right.

The collection ranges from the dust and revolution of Mexico to the sunlit, treacherous households of the old South, from a Texas farm where a hired man's past arrives at the gate to a Denver newsroom in the autumn of 1918, where a young woman falls in love just as influenza begins to empty the city. At the centre stand the Miranda stories, tracing a girl's slow disenchantment with the romantic family legends she has been raised on and her steady progress towards a truth nobody wanted her to have. Elsewhere a dying woman relives a humiliation sixty years old, and an idealist in Mexico City discovers exactly how much her politics have cost other people.

Winner of both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, this volume shows a writer of formidable precision and cold clarity, watching her characters arrive at the moment they can no longer lie to themselves.