All the Days and Nights

The Collected Stories

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.”