Ten Favorite William Maxwell Stories
(Maxwell is among my favorite short story writers. He distinguished between his “stories,” strictly realist and many of them autobiographical, and his “improvisations,” classic once-upon-a-time tales, usually fantastic, which began as bedtime stories for his wife. Here are my top five of each, in order of preference.)
Stories
The Thistles in Sweden
The Front and the Back Parts of the House
What He Was Like
Billie Dyer
With Reference to an Incident at a Bridge
Improvisations
A fable begotten of an echo of a line of verse by W. B. Yeats
The masks
The lamplighter
Newton’s law
The fisherman who had nobody to go out in his boat with him
— February 16, 2021