SOURCE: “Apocalypse In a Teacup,” in The Washington Post, September 18, 1977, p. E3.

In the following review, Tyler offers a favorable evaluation of The Collected Stories of Hortense Calisher.

Hortense Calisher has written, at one time or another, from the viewpoint of a young girl reared expressly to be a kept woman, a man who compulsively slips into the disguises of other people’s lives, and a twirling, humming, multicolored machine from outer space. Her settings are almost always New York, but sometimes it’s New York’s Fifth Avenue and sometimes the seedy, lead-colored warehouse district way, way downtown. And at still other times, it’s the closed world of those transplants to the city who have managed, somehow, to bring their natural habitats with them intact, like the envelopes of scent in which certain perfumed ladies move.

You can lose yourself in one of her short stories...