SOURCE: "Ancient Spirits," in TLS, No. 4780, November 11, 1994, p. 19.

In the following review, Messud states that while many of Walker's earlier short stories are skillful, her later stories are more like memoirs or essays which uphold a political agenda rather than art.

None of the pieces in The Complete Stories of Alice Walker is new: the book is a combined reprinting of her two earlier collections, You Can't Keep A Good Woman Down and In Love and Trouble. It seems perhaps premature, given Walker's relative youth, to have deemed these two books the sum total of her short fiction output, and cynical readers might here spy a marketing strategy designed to dupe fans into buying duplicate copies of the stories unawares. The collection does, however, afford the opportunity to read again the work Walker produced before The Color Purple brought her immense success and she began to focus more...