Library of America #184

"Christopher Carduff selected the contents and wrote the notes for this volume"--P. [vii]

Château -- Stories 1963-1976: A final report; The value of money; A game of chess; The poor orphan girl; The gardens of Mont-Saint-Michel; Over by the river; The thistles in Sweden -- So long, see you tomorrow -- Billie Dyer and other stories: Billie Dyer; Love; The man in the moon; With reference to an incident at a bridge; My father's friends; The front and back parts of the house; The holy terror -- Stories 1986-1999: Grape Bay (1941); The lily-white boys; What he was like; The room outside -- A set of twenty-one improvisations: A love story; The industrious tailor; The country where nobody ever grew old and died; The fisherman who had nobody to go out in his boat with him; The two women friends; The carpenter; The man who had no friends and didn't want any; A fable begotten of an echo of a line verse by W.B. Yeats; The blue finch of Arabia; The sound of waves; The woman who never drew breath except to complain; The masks; The man who lost his father; The old woman whose house was beside a running stream; The pessimistic fortune-teller; The printing office; The lamplighter; The kingdom where straightforward, logical thinking was admired over every other kind; The old man at the railroad crossing; The mean and spiteful toad; All the days and nights -- Other improvisations: The old man who was afraid of falling; The epistolarian; The shepherd's wife; The marble watch; The half-crazy woman; The woman who didn't want anything more; The girl with a willing heart and a cold mind; The woodcutter; The man who had never been sick a day in his life; The problem child; The woman who had no eye for small details; The man who loved to eat; The woman with a talent for talking; Perfection; What you can't hang on to; Mushrooms; The dancing; The education of Her Majesty the Queen; Newton's Law -- Nearing ninety -- Appendix: Preface to The château; Preface to So long, see you tomorrow; Preface to All the days and nights: the collected stories of William Maxwell; Remarks upon accepting the Gold Medal in Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters