SOURCE: "The Collected Stories of Reynolds Price," in The Southern Review, Louisiana State University, Vol. 30, No. 2, Spring, 1994, pp. 371-78.

In the following review, Carlson emphasizes the effective realism and emotional intensity of Price's stories.

I have become certain of one thing in the last half-year: the rich collection of stories in The Collected Stories of Reynolds Price—the galley copy of which I have absolutely torn apart, used up, wrecked—will exist somewhere as a thread in the fabric of twentieth-century American literature. The fifty stories here were written over the span of almost forty years (though Price notes in his introduction that he wrote exclusively in other forms between 1970 and 1990), and half of them come from his earlier collections, The Names and Faces of Heroes (1963) and Permanent Errors (1970). Price has been known as a "Southern Writer," and these stories for the most part would confirm that in...