Edith Wharton: Collected Stories Vol. 2 1911-1937 (LOA #122) (Hardcover)

Hardcover. Library of America presents the second volume in a landmark two-volume collector's edition of the incomparable stories of an American master.Born into an upper-class New York family, Edith Wharton broke with convention and became a professional writer, earning an enduring place as the grande dame of American letters. This Library of America collection (along with its companion volume, Collected Stories: 18911910) presents the finest of Wharton's achievement in short fiction, drawn from the more than eighty stories she published over the course of her career. In this volume, Whartons humor is abundantly evident in sly and subtle stories like Xingu (in which a ladies reading group is led to express its enthusiasm for an occult philosophy) and Charm Incorporated (about a mild-mannered Wall Street executive overwhelmed by his emigre wifes needy but wonderful relatives). As always, Whartons is a provocative voice on the subject of sexuality and womens roles. In The Day of the Funeral, Joy in the House, and Atrophy, love and desire confront the demands of polite society; in Roman Fever, a formal tour de force, two middle-aged women on holiday with their modern daughters revisit the fierce competitiveness of their own youth.Of particular interest are Whartons stories of the uncanny and the supernatural, like the grisly A Bottle of Perrier, set in the North African desert, and the chilling All Souls, written just before her death. An unacknowledged master of American horror fiction, Whartons lucid prose makes all the more powerful her exploration of the irrational forces underlying ordinary life.Also included in this edition are a chronology of Whartons life, explanatory notes, and an essay on the texts.LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nations literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, Americas best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries. Over the course of a long and astonishingly productive literary career that stretched from the early 1890s to just before World War II, Edith Wharton published nearly a dozen story collections, leaving a body of work as various as it is enduring. With this two-volume set, The Library of America presents the finest of Wharton's achievement in short fiction: 67 stories drawn from the entire span of her writing life, including the novella-length works The Touchstone, Sanctuary, and Bunner Sisters, eight shorter pieces never collected by Wharton, and many stories long out-of-print. Her range of setting and subject matter is dazzling, and her mastery of style consistently sure. Here are all the aspects of Wharton's art: her satire, sometimes gentle, sometimes dark and despairing, of upper-class manners; her unblinking recognition of the power of social convention and the limits of passion; her merciless exposure of commercial motivations; her candid exploration of relations between the sexes. The stories range with cosmopolitan ease from her native New York to the salons and summer hotels of Newport, Paris, and the Italian lakes. The depth of her response to World War I is registered in such works as "The Marne" Of particular interest are the remarkable stories which treat occult and supernatural themes rarely encountered in her novels, such as the classic ghost stories "The Eyes" and "Pomegranate Seed" Shipping may be from multiple locations in the US or from the UK, depending on stock availability.…