The Collected Stories.

Price's collected short fiction represents a career spanning nearly forty years. The best stories here are comparable to those of Caroline Gordon (especially "The Long Day"), Flannery O'Connor, and occasionally - when describing the confusion, fear, and wonder of boyhood - Ray Bradbury. The strongest are those set in the rural South and include "The Warrior Princess Ozimba," "The Anniversary," and "Two Useful Visits." A Chain of Love" remains one of the most moving and best crafted American short stories of this century, while "An Early Christmas," set in modern Israel, is a multi-layered work of high accomplishment. With their unique, seamless melding of traditional narrative forms with interior monologue, Price's stories concern ruminations upon the consequences of past decisions, for good or ill; the recognition of a costly spiritual debt owed by the present generation to its predecessor; and the joy, agony, and ultimate goodness of life. "Life is its own end," Russell Kirk has written, summarizing the impulse of Bradbury's stories in words also true of Price's, "if one has a soul to tell him so."