SOURCE: “What a Marvel!,” in The Spectator, May 25, 1996, pp. 32-4.

In the following review, King offers a favorable assessment of Age.

A past president of the American PEN Center and of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, and a recipient of a life-time achievement award of the National Endowments for the Arts, Hortense Calisher is a writer widely known and admired in the States. That this delicate and subtle novella has had to wait eight years for its appearance in this country is an indication that, inexplicably, she is far less well known and admired over here.

More than 40 years have elapsed since an American colleague in Greece pressed on me a copy of Calisher’s first collection of short stories, In the Absence of Angels. I have been reading her ever since. Now 85, she has passed through that melancholy period when reviewers and even...