SOURCE: "The Novel as Omnibus: Auchincloss's Collected Short Fiction," in Louis Auchincloss, Twayne Publishers, 1988, pp. 84-95.

In this chapter from his book on Auchincloss's work, Parseli discusses the author's short story collections, commenting on the manner in which they experiment with long and short forms.

Although deservedly best known for his novels, Auchincloss since the later 1940s has earned acclaim also as a writer of incisive, memorable short stories. In his first two published collections, The Injustice Collectors (1950) and The Romantic Egoists (1954), the stories are thematically linked; in certain subsequent collections, such as Powers of Attorney (1963), Tales of Manhattan (1967), The Partners (1974), the collected stories are linked through recurrent characters as well. In those volumes Auchincloss appears to be attempting a fusion of short and long fiction with stories that can be read either individually or in sequence, offering the double satisfactions of the short story and the novel...