Elizabeth Hardwick was one of America's great postwar women of letters, celebrated as a novelist and an essayist. Until now, however, her slim but remarkable achievement as a writer of short stories has remained largely hidden, tucked away in the pages of the periodicals-such as Partisan Review, The New Yorker, and The New York Review of Books-in which her work originally appeared. This first collection of Hardwick's short fiction reveals her brilliance as a stylist and as an observer of contemporary life. A young woman returns from New York to her childhood Kentucky home and discovers the world of difference within her. A girl's boyfriend is not quite good enough, his "silvery eyes, light and cool, revealing nothing except pure possibility, like a coin in hand." A magazine editor's life falls strangely to pieces after she loses both her husband and her job. Individual lives and the life of New York, the setting or backdrop for most of these stories, come to life in unexpected and lasting ways in Hardwick's beautiful and razor- harp stories.