Collected Stories

About 800 pages, containing nearly all the published and unpublished short stories by Tennessee Williams, which gain enormously from being read en bloc. Quite likely this volume will bring Williams a startling new reputation - rivaling his stature as a playwright - as a great American short-story writer. Readers who once dismissed his fiction as overwritten, precious, bizarre lispings out of Kraft-Ebing's Psychopathia Sexualis may well have to revise their sneers. The best - and there's a lot of it - is solid work, worthy of our finest short-story writers. As Gore Vidal points out in his attractively Vidalesque introduction, the stories fall into four groups. First, those written up to 1941 when, at 30, he became a professionally produced if unsuccessful playwright with Battle of Angels. The second period was from 1941 to 1945, when he became a hugely successful professional playwright. . . Third, the great period, 1945 to 1952, when all the ideas for the plays were either in his head as stories - or on the stage itself. Fourth, the rest of his life when he wrote few stories. . . His first story, published in Weird Tales at 17, is an alluringly polished Egyptian Gothic, but he moves quickly into mature storytelling. Among a marvelously written dozen standouts are The Overstuffed Chair, a moving family portrait and the only story printed out of chronological order; Two on a Party, about a female lush and a fairy who travel together and sleep together, with sometimes a stranger between them; ONe Arm, about a young, one-armed Apollo-Christ-hustler on death row; Desire and the Black Masseur, which deserves to be discovered afresh; The Kingdom of Earth, a perfectly voiced cornpone, lust-crazed myth; and Completed, written at 71, about a 20-year-old nearly mute debutante who has not had her first period but is having a coming-out party anyway. All told, a fat collection of misfits, grotesques, castoffs and riff-raff, all of them revealed by a genius of the damned. (Kirkus Reviews)