Description
Seven previously unpublished stories of the Great Depression by America’s poet laureate of the lost
These tales were penned by one Thomas Lanier Williams of Missouri before he became a successful playwright, and yet his voice is unmistakable.
The reliable idiosyncrasies and quiet dignity of Williams’s eccentrics are already present in his characters. Consider the diminutive octogenarian of “The Caterpillar Dogs”, who may have just met her match in a pair of laughing Pekinese that refuse to obey; the retired, small-town evangelist in “Every Friday Nite is Kiddies Nite”, who wears bright-coloured pyjamas and receives a message from God to move to St. Louis and finally, finally go to the movies again; or the distraught factory worker whose stifled artistic spirit, and just a soupçon of the macabre, propel the drama of “Stair to the Roof”.
Love’s diversions and misdirections, even autoerotic longings, are found in these delightful lagniappes: in “Season of Grapes,” the intoxicating ripeness of summer in the Ozarks acquaints one young man with his own passions, which turn into a fever dream, and the first revelation of female sexuality blooms for a college boy in “Ironweed”. Is there such a thing as innocence? Apparently in the 1930s there was, and Williams reveals it in these stories.
Reviews
"Williams’s ear for dialogue, his eye for character and his dramatic gifts are as powerful in his stories as they are in his plays." — John Berendt, The New York Times
Also By: Tennessee Williams 
The Luck of Friendship: The Letters of Tennessee Williams and James Laughlin
Hardback, 2018
Four decades of correspondence of Tennessee Williams’s and James Laughlin’s unlikely yet enduring literary and personal relationship.The Luck of Friendship: The Letters of Tennessee Williams and James Laughlin
E Book, 2018
Four decades of correspondence of Tennessee Williams’s and James Laughlin’s unlikely yet enduring literary and personal relationship.
Now the Cats With Jeweled Claws & Other One-Act Plays
Paperback, 2016
“The peak of my virtuosity was in the one-act plays—like firecrackers in a rope.” —Tennessee Williams
Now the Cats With Jeweled Claws & Other One-Act Plays
E Book, 2016
“The peak of my virtuosity was in the one-act plays—like firecrackers in a rope.” —Tennessee Williams
The Collected Poems of Tennessee Williams
E Book, 2016
All of the author's previously published poems, including poems from the plays, are in this definitive edition that comes with a CD of the author reading some of his poems in his unmistakable...
