[The Collected Stories of William Goyen] is the book William Goyen has been writing all his career. A born storyteller, even his four novels (The House of Breath, In a Farther Country, The Fair Sister, Come the Restorer) are composed of stories joined together by a common thread of locale of circumstance, so many beads on a string…. Covering a creative span of nearly thirty years, the book reveals what too few have acknowledged: William Goyen is one of our most distinguished and uncompromising fiction writers.

In the past, some critics have dismissed Goyen's work as too "poetic" or too "regional." (He was born in and writes most frequently of the Southwest.) Yet the surprise of his Collected Stories is the extraordinary range of his work. These stories not only transcend the regionalism from which they sprang, they also are more than poetic or symbolic. They are, in...