Best known for his highly acclaimed autobiographical work, Last Stands: Notes from Memory (1982), Hilary Masters is an accomplished novelist, essayist, short-story writer, and memoirist. A realist and a regionalist, Masters follows in the tradition of other American realists such as Peter Taylor, Sherwood Anderson, and his own father, Edgar Lee Masters. His two collections of short stories, Hammertown Tales (1986) and Success: New and Selected Short Stories (1992), as well as his other short fiction, reiterate the themes and techniques often appearing in his longer works. Much of his work is filled with characters longing to recapture lost memories, dealing with relationships, and finding closure by examining their ideals and accepting their situations. Characters, rather than plot, are often the focus of his work. Masters weaves compelling stories and situations into ordinary settings with which his readers can identify. "It seems a sorrowful mystery," wrote Susan Dodd in Harvard Review...