In a career of nearly six decades, novelist and short-story writer Hortense Calisher has produced an impressive body of work--six books of stories and novellas, fourteen novels, and two memoirs--and has received many awards and honors, including a National Endowment for the Arts Lifetime Achievement Award in 1989. Her frequently anthologized stories have earned her several O. Henry Awards and have appeared in several volumes of Best American Short Stories. She has not, however, enjoyed the popular acclaim that one might expect to attend such original and well-crafted work. Since the publication of her first novel in 1961, ten years after her first book of stories, Calisher has frequently been called a "writer's writer"; her distinctive style--often labeled "Jamesian," "convoluted," "rococo," and even, by Anthony Burgess, "too Calisherianly articulate" (The New York Times Book Review, 7 November 1965)--has remained a critical focal point. For the most part more conventional and stylistically...