Maxwell, William

So Long, See You Tomorrow

On an Illinois farm in the 1920s, a man is murdered, and in the same moment the tenous friendship between two lonely boys comes to an end. In telling their interconnected stories, American Book Award winner William delivers a masterfully restrained and magically evocative meditation on the past. "A small, perfect novel."--Washington Post Book World.

They Came Like Swallows

In the Morison house the important goes unsaid and indirection is the operative mode--conversation stops where it should start and key terms such as fear, pain, pregnancy, fail to be addressed. The younger son, an eight-year-old, passes his days deciphering adults' inaccessible discussions. "In this fashion they communicated with each other, out of knowledge and experience inaccessible to Bunny. By nods and silences. By a tired curve of his mother's mouth. By his father's measuring glance over the top of his spectacles." Bunny's older brother would rather escape to the outside world, and their father finds declaiming the day's headlines--World War I's end and the onslaught of Spanish Influenza--far preferable to engagement. Only Elizabeth, their mother, is capable of holding the family together. The fifth main character in They Came Like Swallows is the house itself. Maxwell expresses the boys' reactions through this labile, interior landscape. Bunny finds the dining room can be "braced and ready for excitement"; later his brother realizes "for the first time how still the house was, how full of waiting, ... tense and expectant." Though war never makes it to Illinois, the flu changes all. First Bunny is stricken, and once he recovers Elizabeth, pregnant, dies from it. In quiet, piercing prose, William Maxwell's second novel, originally published in 1937, evokes the greatest of losses and the terrors of imagination.

hrough the eyes of two boys and their father, William Maxwell reveals the complex woman who is the unacknowledged source of their happiness--and whose death during the influenza epic of 1918 will devastate them all. They Came Like Swallows tenderly depicts the currents of love and need that run through every family--and whose true depth becomes evident only in moments of tragedy.

The Folded Leaf

Here is a classic novel from one of our most honored writers--the author of such acclaimed works as So Long, See You Tomorrow and All the Days and Nights." The Folded Leaf is the serenely observed yet deeply moving story of two boys finding one another in the Midwest of the 1920s, when childhood lasted longer than it does today and even adults were more innocent of what life could bring.

All The Days And Nights: The Collected Stories of William Maxwell

8 new stories and most of what was in his last three collections.

"Beautifully wrought... a radiant collection... Maxwell writes with such clear-eyed sympathy for his characters, such consumate knowledge of their place in a matrix of family and friends." --The New York Times

Ancestors: A Family History

The National Book Award-winning author of So Long, See You Tomorrow offers an astonishing evocation of a vanished world, as he retraces, branch by branch, the history of his family, taking readers into the lives of settlers, itinerant preachers, and small businessmen, examining the way they saw their world and how they imagined the world to come.

The Chateau

All the Days and Nights: The Collected Stories

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.

The Outermost Dream: Literary Sketches

With the publication of The Outermost Dream, a collection of essays by William Maxwell, Graywolf Press's Rediscovery Series has saved from obscurity yet another literary jewel. Most of these pieces originally appeared in the New Yorker, where Maxwell was a fiction editor for 40 years, on the occasion of the release of a biography, memoir, diary, or collection of correspondence by or about a noted (or not-so-noted) author. Maxwell brings such a stunning combination of intellect and passion to his subject matter that his essays (one can hardly call them mere book reviews) are, as Maxwell expects of great writing, astonishing. Each is a sharply focused miniature, allowing the reader to enter the world that Maxwell describes, whether it be that of a humble 19th-century curate-cum-diarist or the young V. S. Pritchett, who published his first work, a joke in the Paris Herald, while working as a stock clerk for a photographic-plate manufacturer. It is a rare pleasure to find oneself in such capable hands.

Time Will Darken It: A Novel (Nonpareil Book, 28)

Nonpareil Book 28

Music At Long Verney

"Reading these wonderful, almost-lost stories is like finding a buried treasure of fine gold and silver."--Alison Lurie

Of the previous century's many great storytellers, Sylvia Townsend Warner was the supreme enchantress. The Music at Long Verney collects twenty of her best short stories, most of them from the great years at The New Yorker. They span a full half-century, from 1929 to 1977, and are crowded with irrepressible, living characters and even more animated objects and incidents. There are stories of romantic love and the mysteries of marriage; of artists who speak the truth even as they distort reality; of gardens and houses and very fine things and of those who fancy themselves their owners. The centerpiece of the collection is a series of five linked stories about an eccentric establishment, the Abbey Antiques Gallery, and its singular proprietor, the urbane Mr. Edom. Some of these stories are hilarious, others hauntingly lyrical, but all are incomparably witty and original--in short, they're vintage Warner.

"On every page," writes John Updike, "there is something to be seen or smelled or felt. . . Beneath her refined witchery lies a strange freshness one can only call, in praise, primitive."