"Petry is the writer we have been waiting for; hers are the stories we
need to fully illuminate the questions of our moment, while also
offering a page-turning good time. Ann Petry, the woman, had it all, and
so does her insightful, prescient and unputdownable prose." -- Tayari
Jones, New York Times Book Review
From the author of the bestselling novel The Street, comes a
powerful collection of stories that captures a remarkably diverse
panorama of African American experience in the 1950s and 1960s.
A small-town pharmacist's decision to take a day off leads his wife to
an agonizing encounter with the police. A retired Black college
professor teaching at a predominately white high school is kidnapped and
forced to witness an unthinkable horror. A young Black girl watches her
aunt's suitors threaten her family's wellbeing, with repercussions that
reverberate for decades. Ann Petry wrote these and the other
extraordinary stories in this collection over half a century ago, but
the problems they interrogate still exist today, incisively uncovering
the consequences of America's pervasive racism, while telling timeless
stories of everyday lives, of aspiration, frustration, and love. Miss
Muriel and Other Stories is "a delicate, unflinching probe into
African-American existence" (Boston Globe) from one of the most gifted
writers of the twentieth century. Originally published between 1945 and
1971, Petry's stories are "a delicate, unflinching probe into
African-American existence" (Boston Globe) and an assertion of her
status as one of the most gifted writers of the twentieth century.
"I've recently had my brain re-wired by Ann Petry, and it's that
exhilarating feeling of falling in love with one of your lifetime
writers for the first time." --Brandon Tyler
