Affable, persuasive, never glossy, never hurrying, steadily gaining ground, [the narratives of "The Collected Stories of Peter Taylor"] are not glamorous, or side-splitting, or desperate (they are not like the stories of Jean Stafford, or Eudora Welty, or Flannery O'Connor); they are what Macbeth calls "understood relation that bring forth—the secret'st man of blood"—they are connective tissue.

The short fiction of Peter Taylor takes the form of a holding action. Holding off, first of all, keeping at bay a faceless, unacknowledging world…. And then holding on, for dear life, to those linking pieties of the southern American town…. In the middle South of the last four decades anatomized by these stories, holding is an action, but also a passion; a movement, but also an emotion. (p. 4)

The early work, as titles like "A Spinster's Tale" and "The Fancy Woman" suggest, concerns outsiders, exiles and solitaries who...