All the Days and Nights - (Vintage International) by William Maxwell (Paperback)

About the Book

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.

Book Synopsis

From the National Book Award-winning author of So Long, See You Tomorrow comes a masterful collection of stories, spanning more than 50 years--the life's work of one of American's most widely and justly honored writers.

"Beautifully wrought. . . Maxwell writes with such clear-eyed sympathy for his characters. . . A radiant collection." --The New York Times

Whether he is writing about a small town in turn-of-the-century Illinois or a precariously balanced enclave of the good life on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, William Maxwell has the power to immerse us completely in his fictional worlds and to elicit our empathetic allegiance to his nuanced characters. The paper boy plying his route (and anxiously contemplating his awakening sexuality) under the all-seeing eye of God; the couple who come home one Christmas Day to find their house ransacked by burglars; the American tourist traveling through a France that has changed utterly since his last visit--in the hands of Maxwell, their stories become our own, at once fresh and familiar, unsettling and deeply comforting.

The twenty-one stories in All the Days and Nights span more than half a century and more layers of memory and feeling than are contained in most books of history. Together, they make up what their author calls "a Natural History of home."

Review Quotes

"All the Days and Nights is a cause for celebration. . . . One more brilliant testimony to William Maxwell's eloquence, grace, and wit. Not to mentio his transcendent vision." --Cleveland Plain Dealer

"No one else currently writing cn capture as Maxwell does a sense of life in the blanace, of a moment appreciated. . . Maxwell, dealing in very ordinary days and nights, makes them luminous. . . . the beauty of some sentences is like a stab of light." --Chicago Tribune

"Written with exquisite restraint, the work illustrates the rare sensitivity, telling detail, and bare, graceful prose that have become Maxwell's trademarks. Authentic and spare, the stories balance the tension between life's exhilaration and haunting sadness." --San Francisco Chronicle

"Fiction that . . . honors the physical world with verisimilitude, human experience with emotional fidelity, and the enlgihs langauge with consummate craft." --The Wall Street Journal

"Like their peers in the work of Tolstoy, Chekhov, Porter and Welty, [William Maxwell's stories] slowly lure the reader into ironclad but transparent rooms. . . . He wills us only an elegant pleasure, a deepend vision of our lost past, and a comprehending mercy now, in the smaller world of our diminished present." --Reynolds Price

About the Author

William Maxwell was born in 1908 in Lincoln, Illinois. He studied at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and after earning a master's at Harvard, returned there to teach freshman composition before turning to writing. He published six novels, three collections of short fiction, an autobiographical memoir, a collection of literary essays and reviews, and a book for children. For 40 years, he was a fiction editor at The New Yorker. From 1969 to 1972 he was president of the National Institute of Arts and Letters. He received the Brandeis Creative Arts Award Medal and, for So Long, See You Tomorrow, the National Book Award and the Howells Medal of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He died in 2000.