As befits an age of universal solitude, in which art often is about art, William Goyen's stories are a testament to the essentiality of telling. He regards such communication as a form of love, a process including seeing and saying: to tell one must know; once one knows he must tell. The teller devotes his life to shaping an "anxious shapelessness" into truth. (p. 77)

The willingness to discipline himself in the use of language underlies his entire achievement as a writer. His stories ring with precision because they are language told to someone, not simply private, inchoate voices…. The Collected Stories of William Goyen … presents his ideas with remarkable continuity and seems to have been his means of experimenting in form and of finding "a language I thought I could use." Whether he writes of homelessness, fragmentation of individuals, elusiveness of the past, or the miracle of human...