This selection of Kay Boyle's short fiction [Fifty Stories] spans almost forty years of work and is itself only the sparest sampling of her total literary production…. (p. 286)

Most typically in her stories, [Boyle] presents herself as a vitally interested witness. The events that seize her sympathies tend to be those in which social determinations collide with human hopes, rendering the latter poignant in their twisted impotence….

Boyle's fiction has an astounding variety of landscape, and especially in the rural countryside, whether French, Austrian or British, her stories seem to be comfortably at home. In general, although her European villagers receive a national or ethnic distinctiveness largely through commonplace details of language, custom and their attitudes toward their neighbors and enemies, the sense of a permanently rooted connection between them and the ageless life of the land (weather, topography, seasons, crops) is consistently and surely evoked. In fact...