SOURCE: Williams, Susan Millar. “Guilty Pleasures.” Women's Review of Books 18, no. 7 (April 2001): 19.

In the following favorable assessment of Collected Stories, Williams offers a thematic overview of Gilchrist's short fiction.

I've always been a fan of Ellen Gilchrist. Partly it's just that the places she loves are also the places I love—San Francisco, New Orleans, the Mississippi Delta and above all the weird and wonderful little university town of Fayetteville, Arkansas. “Fateville,” as one of Gilchrist's characters calls it. When I lived in Fayetteville, just a couple of years before Gilchrist came there to study in the famous MFA program presided over by Miller Williams and Jim Whitehead, I was fond of saying that nobody would ever be able to write a story that captured the essence of the place. I was soon proved wrong by Gilchrist's novel The Annunciation and by many of the stories in this...