SOURCE: Phillips, Robert. Review of Jack of Diamonds and Other Stories, by Elizabeth Spencer. America 159, no. 8 (1 October 1988): 202-04.

In the following review of Jack of Diamonds, Phillips provides a succinct overview of Spencer's literary output.

Some fiction writers are equally skillful in the short story as in the novel. One thinks immediately of Hardy, Hemingway and Elizabeth Bowen. In our time John O'Hara, Bernard Malamud, Hortense Calisher, Eudora Welty, John Updike and Joyce Carol Oates all have written stories that are at least as acclaimed as their best novels. This is no small feat, when one considers the totally different disciplines and visions the forms require.

Elizabeth Spencer is another whose stories rival her novels. She has published six full-length novels and two novellas, beginning with Fire in the Morning in 1948. But she also is the author of well over 40 short stories of distinction, most collected in two...