SOURCE: "The Short Fiction of George Garrett," in Ploughshares, Vol. 4, No. 3, 1978, pp. 83-90.

In the following essay, Peden surveys Garrett's short fiction, praising the author's writing skills and treatment of universal themes.

George Garrett has written four volumes of short fiction along with about thirty uncollected pieces including "A Record As Long As Your Arm," which appears in this issue of Ploughshares. He's had his share of praise along the way, but not as much as his short fiction warrants. In a very real way, he's been a story-teller all his life, talking them before he could read, he tells me in some very recent conversations via cassette and the United States Postal Service. The most important single influence on his early stories was Chaucer, which really isn't very surprising when you consider the variety and exuberance of Garrett's canon.

An experimenter and an innovator for years before...