Houghton Mifflin Company

With a new introduction from best-selling author Ann Patchett, this National Book Award-winning story collection is one of the great works of twentieth-century American literature. Eudora Welty wrote novels, novellas, and reviews over the course of her long career, but the heart and soul of her literary vision lay with the short story, and her National Book Award-winning Collected Stories confirmed her as a master of short fiction. The forty-one pieces collected in this new edition, written over a period of three decades, showcase Welty's incredible dexterity as a writer. Her style seamlessly shifts from the comic to the tragic, from realistic portraits to surrealistic ones, as she deftly moves between folklore and myth, race and history, family and farce, and the Mississippi landscape she knew so well, her wry wit and keen sense of observation always present on the page.

"O'Brien has written a vital, important book-a book that matters not only to the reader interested in Vietnam, but to anyone interested in the craft of writing as well."-Michiko Kakutani, New York Times A classic work of American literature that has not stopped changing minds and lives since it burst onto the literary scene, The Things They Carried is a ground-breaking meditation on war, memory, imagination, and the redemptive power of storytelling. The Things They Carried depicts the men of Alpha Company: Jimmy Cross, Henry Dobbins, Rat Kiley, Mitchell Sanders, Norman Bowker, Kiowa, and the character Tim O'Brien, who has survived his tour in Vietnam to become a father and writer at the age of forty-three. Taught everywhere-from high school classrooms to graduate seminars in creative writing-it has become required reading for any American and continues to challenge readers in their perceptions of fact and fiction, war and peace, courage and fear and longing. The Things They Carried won France's prestigious Prix du Meilleur Livre Etranger and the Chicago Tribune Heartland Prize; it was also a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award.