All the Days and Nights: The Collected Stories
William Maxwell
Language: English
Pages: 432
ISBN: 0679761020
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
From the American Book Award-winning author of Ancestors and Time Will Darken comes a masterful collection of stories, spanning more than 50 years--a tour of a world that engages readers entirely, and whose characters command the deepest loyalty and tenderness.
wondered at. What seems most likely is that Dr. Dyer’s wife was ill and that someone not a member of the family broke up the household. But then how did the diary get to Texas from Kansas City? It is eerie, in any case, and as if Dr. Dyer had gone on talking after his death, but about a much earlier part of his life. When the odds are so against something happening, it is tempting to look around for a supernatural explanation, such as that William Dyer’s spirit, dissatisfied with the life he had
German plane was brought down at Raon-l’Étape and the dead aviators were given a military funeral, which he attended. After nearly a month here, he again found himself in a convoy, which drove all day and at 11 p.m. stopped along the roadside for the night. The truck he was riding in was so crowded that he got out and slept on the ground, wrapped in his blankets, and was awakened two hours later by a downpour. He moved under the truck, but his blankets became so wet that he gave up and moved
speak he could only utter meaningless sounds. Now, through the tops of the bare trees, the tailor could see the stars, so bright and so far away … But how did it get to be autumn, he wondered. And why am I not cold? Why am I not hungry? He fell asleep and dreamed that he had more work to do than he could possibly manage, and woke up with the sun shining in his face. “Wife?” he called out, before he remembered where he was or what had happened to him. He sat up and looked around. There was no
porch he would reach backward into his canvas bag, take out a folded copy of the Draperville Evening Star, and let fly with it. That dead self, the boy he used to be. The one you used to have such trouble with, he wanted to say to his father, but Mr. Ferrers did not like talking about the past. “That’s all water over the dam,” he said once when Edward asked him a question about his mother. On the other hand, he did sometimes like to talk about local history — what the business district was like
in the room agreed with, he knew, and no doubt it had been put into his mind when he was a child. For it was something that he never failed to be struck by — those sweeping statements in praise of Draperville that were almost an article of religious faith. They spoke about each other in much the same way. “There isn’t a finer man anywhere on this earth,” they would say, in a tone of absolute conviction, sometimes about somebody who was indeed admirable, but just as often it would be some local