The Collected Stories Of Katherine Anne Porter

Porter's reputation as one of americanca's most distinguished writers rests chiefly on her superb short stories. This volume includes the collections Flowering Judas; Pale Horse, Pale Rider; and The Leaning Tower as well as four stories not available elsewhere in book form. Winner of the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize.

This “dazzling” National Book Award finalist set aboard an ocean liner in 1931 reflects the passions and prejudices that sparked World War II (San Francisco Chronicle). August 1931. An ocean liner bound for Germany sets out from the Mexican port city of Veracruz. The ship’s first-class passengers include an idealistic young American painter and her lover; a Spanish dance troupe with a sideline in larceny; an elderly German couple and their fat, seasick bulldog; and a boisterous band of Cuban medical students. As the Vera journeys across the Atlantic, the incidents and intrigues of several dozen passengers and crew members come into razor-sharp focus. The result is a richly drawn portrait of the human condition in all its complexity and a mesmerizing snapshot of a world drifting toward disaster. Written over a span of twenty years and based on the diary Katherine Anne Porter kept during a similar ocean voyage, Ship of Fools was the bestselling novel of 1962 and the inspiration for an Academy Award–winning film starring Vivien Leigh. It is a masterpiece of American literature as captivating today as when it was first published more than a half century ago. This ebook features an illustrated biography of Katherine Anne Porter, including rare photos from the University of Maryland Libraries.

The classic 1944 collection of ten short stories by the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award–winning author and journalist Incomparable in their dramatic clarity and emotional force, the ten gems in this collection affirm Katherine Anne Porter’s genius for writing stories, as Eudora Welty observed, “with a power that stamps them to their very last detail on the memory.” The collection includes The Old Order, a sequence of short stories that paints a devastating portrait of the racial inequities that plague life in the American South, as well as other selected stories such as “The Leaning Tower” and “The Downward Path to Wisdom”.

This volume brings together 29 pieces dating from before 1932, none of which appear in her collected works and many of which are published here for the first time. Includes both fiction and essays.

Winner of the Katherine Anne Porter Prize in Short Fiction, 2008. Most of the nine stories in Last Known Position were written upon James Mathews' return from combat deployment to the Middle East with the D.C. Air National Guard. Life under fire provided the author with both dramatic events and a heightened sense of observation, allowing him to suggest the stress of combat as the driving factor behind extreme yet believable characterization and action. Military experiences and settings cause certain human elements and truisms to emerge more profoundly and dramatically. These stories portray desperate characters driven to make desperate choices. Always on the edge of a dark and unpleasant reality, Mathews' characters survive by embracing fantasy, humor, violence, and sometimes redemption. Each story bears its own brand of hopeless quirkiness. Four teenagers on an army base steal a grenade and are stalked by a parade horse. A drifter returns home to rob the grandparents who raised him. A national guardsman faces a homicidal superior officer in Iraq on the eve of war. An elderly man worries that his wife's new house guests are unrepentant cannibals. Always tense, sometimes ridiculous, and never dull, Last Known Position brings the reader to places unknown before and unforgettable after.

Katherine Anne Porter's life closely paralleled that of her century not only in its span (1890-1980) but in its interests and contradictions. A communist sympathizer who became a quasi fascist; a cosmopolitan who embraced southern agrarianism, a femme fatale whose writings nonetheless evince feminist feeling, Porter embodied, often at their extremes, the major currents of her time and ours. In this new biography Janis P. Stout argues that these inconsistencies can be viewed as part and parcel of modernism itself. Drawing on Porter's rich and voluminous correspondence as well as published works, Stout here sets out to craft an intellectual biography of a woman who, by her own admission, was "not really an intellectual". Stout reveals the extent of Porter's involvement in events of public significance and her interactions with prominent figures, from President Alvaro Obregon of Mexico in 1920 to Hermann Goering in Berlin in 1931, to Robert Penn Warren, Eudora Welty, Allen Tate, and others in the 1930s and 1940s, to members of the Lyndon Johnson White House in the 1960s. Against the backdrop of world war and cold war, Porter's conflicting views on politics, race, religion, and feminism reflected Porter's ambivalence toward her own Texas roots.

She only wished to prove to herself she was once more on a train going somewhere' A tender story of devotion, resentment and ennui from the Pulitzer Prize-winning writer.