Amusing events occur when Arturo, the parrot who works in a shoe store, fits the other birds with new shoes.

Famous literary friendships such as those between H.L. Mencken and James Joyce, Gustave Flaubert and Ivan Turgenev, and Elizabeth Bishop and Marianne Moore are examined in this magnificent collection of stories, legends, poems, essays, letters, and memoirs that illuminate the breadth and depth of friendship in all its human complexity.

With a new introduction from best-selling author Ann Patchett, this National Book Award-winning story collection is one of the great works of twentieth-century American literature. Eudora Welty wrote novels, novellas, and reviews over the course of her long career, but the heart and soul of her literary vision lay with the short story, and her National Book Award-winning Collected Stories confirmed her as a master of short fiction. The forty-one pieces collected in this new edition, written over a period of three decades, showcase Welty's incredible dexterity as a writer. Her style seamlessly shifts from the comic to the tragic, from realistic portraits to surrealistic ones, as she deftly moves between folklore and myth, race and history, family and farce, and the Mississippi landscape she knew so well, her wry wit and keen sense of observation always present on the page.

"Story after wonderful story, tall tale after tall tale. Ray Lum tells a southern writer where he came from, and where he ought to go."
-Shelby Foote

"Bill Ferris makes me wish I'd known Ray Lum."
-Larry Brown

"Indeed, the mule trader has undoubtedly helped to form our great oral tradition in the South . Ray Lum was] a man born and bred to the practice of the country monologue."
-Eudora Welty

Readers captivated by this book will be happy that Bill Ferris found Ray Lum and that he thought to turn on a tape recorder. Lum (1891--1977) was a mule skinner, a livestock trader, an auctioneer, and an American original.

This delightful book, first published in 1992 as "You Live and Learn. Then You Die and Forget It All," preserves Lum's colorful folk dialect and captures the essence of this one-of-a-kind figure who seems to have stepped full-blooded from the pages of Mark Twain. This riveting talespinner was tall, heavy-set, and full of body rhythm as he talked. In his special world he was famous for trading, for tale-telling, and for common-sense lessons that had made him a savvy bargainer and a shrewd businessman. His home and his auction barn were in Vicksburg, Mississippi, where mules were his main interest, but in trading he fanned out over twenty states and even into Mexico. A west Texas newspaper reported his fame this way: He is known all over cow country for his honest fair dealing and gentlemanly attitude..... A letter addressed to him anywhere in Texas probably would be delivered.

Over several years Ferris recorded Lum's many long conversations that detail livestock auctioneering, cheery memories of rustic Deep South culture, and a philosophy of life that is grounded in good horse sense. Even among the most spellbinding talkers Lum is a standout both for what he has to say and for the way he says it. Ferris's lucky, protracted encounters with him turn out to be the best of good fortune for everybody.

Thirteen outstanding short stories by Welty, written between 1937 and 1951. "Miss Welty has written some of the finest short stories of modern times" (Orville Prescott, New York Times). Selected and with an Introduction by Ruth M. Vande Kieft.

The people of Mount Salus, Mississippi always felt good about Judge McKelva. He was a quiet, solid reassuring figure, just as a judge should be. Then, ten years after his first wife's death, he marries the frivolous young Wanda Fay. No-one can understand his action, not least his beloved daughter, Laurel, who finds it hard to accept the new bride. It is only some years later, when circumstance brings her back to her childhood home, that Laurel stirs old memories and comes to understand the peculiarities of her upbringing, and the true relationship between her parents and herself. The Optimist's Daughter is a reflective, poignant novel of independence and love, for which Eudora Welty, one of America's gretest contemporary Southern writers, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize.

First published in 1949, THE GOLDEN APPLES is an acutely observed, richly atmospheric portrayal of small town life in Morgana, Mississippi. There's Snowdie, who has to bring up her twin boys alone after her husband, King Maclain, disappears one day, discarding his hat on the banks of the Big Black. There's Loch Morrison, convalescing with malaria, who watches from his bedroom window as wayward Virgie Rainey meets a sailor in the vacant house opposite. Meanwhile, Miss Eckhart the piano teacher, grieving the loss of her most promising pupil, tries her hand at arson. Eudora Welty has a fine ear for dialogue and describes each of the characters in incisive, haunting prose. '...in the South,' she says, 'everybody stays busy talking all the time - they're not sorry for you to overhear their tales'. Welty deftly picks up their stories to create an unflinching potrait of everyday life in the American South and offers a deeply moving look at human nature.

A Depression-era comic masterpiece, E. P. O'Donnell's The Great Big Doorstep centers on the Crochets, a Cajun family who live in a ramshackle house between the levee and the Mississippi River. The Crochets dream of one day owning a stately plantation befitting the magnificent cypress doorstep they have salvaged from the river and proudly display outside their humble home. The memorable characters in this novel have their own concerns: the patriarch, Commodo, is full of wild bravado as he fluctuates between scheming, laboring, and malingering; his wife reigns as the queen of retort, though toughened by years of making do and doing without. The Crochet children also cope with personal struggles: Topal, twenty, restless, and moody, and recently dumped by her fiancA (c); Arthur, eighteen, attempts to strike out on his own while dodging the coddling of his mother and the fury of his father; Evvie, almost fifteen, plans to join a religious order after renouncing a lover; and twins Gussie and Paul, and baby T. J., provide an ongoing chorus of laughter and tears. The Great Big Doorstep has remained a literary and cultural classic since its publication in 1941. In an 1979 afterword, Eudora Welty praises O'Donnell's comic genius, citing his ""supreme gift"" for dialogue, while Bryan Giemza's introduction underscores the work's place in the tradition of comic Southern novels.

At last it's available again, and in paperback, the book that Charlotte Capers' hosts of readers have been urging back into print. One of Mississippi's most fascinating personalities and one of its absolutely best raconteurs, Capers can hold any reader of listener enthralled with her witty, delicious narratives. Here she focuses upon whatever seized her insights--mainly life in its ordinary gait--yet her reports of the smalltown scene are as alluring as the tales of Shaharazade.These delightful essays, as Eudora Welty says in the foreward, "were written to amuse, and they abundantly do so."

Although she is eminent primarily as the prize-winning author of classic works of fiction, Eudora Welty is notable also as an astute literary critic. Her essays on the art of fiction and on the writers who enlarged the range of the short story and the novel are definitive pieces. Her distinguished book reviews, along with her critical essays, augment her reputation for being one of the most discerning author-critics in literary America.

This collection of her book reviews manifests the connecting of her penetrating eye with her responsive intellect in forming sympathetic judgments of the books she reviewed. Between 1942 and 1984 Welty wrote sixty-seven reviews of seventy-four books. Fifty-eight of these appeared in the "New York Times Book Review," and others in the "Saturday Review of Literature, Tomorrow, " the "Hudson Review, " the "New York Post," and the "Sewanee Review." The reviewed books include novels, short story collections, books of essays, biographies and memoirs, books of letters, children's books, books of ghost stories, photography books, books of literary criticism, and books of World War II art.

Over nearly half a century she reviewed books by some of the foremost authors of her time: Virginia Woolf, William Faulkner, V. S. Pritchett, Colette, Isak Dinesen, E. B. White, E. M. Forster, J. D. Salinger, Ross Macdonald, Patrick White, S. J. Perelman, Annie Dillard, Elizabeth Bowen, and Katherine Anne Porter.

"A Writer's Eye" includes all of Welty's book reviews, even one published in the "New York Times Book Review" under the pseudonym "Michael Ravenna." Sixteen of the reviews were collected previously in Welty's "The Eye of the Story" (1978). In this collection Pearl Amelia McHaney's introduction records the history of Welty's career in book reviewing and illuminates the honesty and compassion with which Welty wrote reviews.

Welty's keen vision, her wit, and her refined style make these "monuments to interruption," a phrase she wrote in description of Virginia Woolf's essays and reviews, an important record of her literary standards and special interests. They show as well how book reviewing consumed a large measure of creative time that she customarily devoted to fiction writing. Placed beside her authoritative critical essays, this volume enhances Welty's considerable literary stature and completes the image of Eudora Welty as a consummate woman of letters.

Eudora Welty, (1909-2001), was one of the twentieth-century's most critically- acclaimed authors and a master of the short story. Her literary canon encompasses works of fiction and nonfiction, including essays, book reviews, and a best-selling memoir. Pearl Amelia McHaney is associate professor of English at Georgia State University.

For nearly thirty years and through the tenure of five editors-in-chief, Nash K. Burger was on the editorial staff of the "New York Times Book Review." In this engaging reminiscence he explores the route that took him to that bastion of the book world, headquartered in New York City on West 43rd Street. Burger is a natural raconteur whose ease with the word enhances this appealing narrative. His point of view, though particularly southern, has been honed for a national audience who will be entertained and enlightened by his personal perspective.

Burger grew up in a circle of talented adolescents in Jackson, Mississippi that includes one of his oldest friends, the author Eudora Welty, who preceded him at the "Book Review" during one summer when she served as copy editor. By 1945 Burger joined a few other distinguished Mississippians, such as Turner Catledge, at the "New York Times," and in the stream of years that followed he reviewed more than 1,300 books.

From his earliest days Burger was a reader and a writer. Instinctively drawn to books, he moved on to editing. From his position at the "Book Review" he wrote frequently but not exclusively on his favorite subjects: the Civil War, religion, and the literature of the American South. The trail he has left from West 43rd Street is that of the intelligent, mindful southern gentleman. Twenty years after his departure, as his friend Miss Welty proclaimed for his retirement party, his is "a mind both clear and wise, responsive and reflective, that has yet to be amazed for the first time at the human comedy around him. He won't stop living with books; whatever he does, he'll write or edit or publish."

Nash K. Burger (deceased) was an author, editor, and book reviewer. Pearl A. McHaney is a professor of English at Georgia State University and editor of several books on Eudora Welty. Eudora Welty (deceased) is the author of many critically acclaimed novels and short stories.

The Optimist's Daughter is the story of Laurel McKelva Hand, a young woman who has left the South and returns, years later, to New Orleans, where her father is dying. After his death, she and her silly young stepmother go back still farther, to the small Mississippi town where she grew up. Alone in the old house, Laurel finally comes to an understanding of the past, herself, and her parents.

This is the first collection of Welty's stories, originally published in 1941. It includes such classics as "A Worn Path," "Petrified Man," "Why I Live at the P.O.," and "Death of a Traveling Salesman." The historic Introduction by Katherine Anne Porter brought Welty to the attention of the american reading public.

Legendary figures of Mississippi's colorful past--keel-boatman Mike Fink and the dread Harp brothers--along with characters from Eudora Welty's own delightful imagination people this rollicking fantasy set along the Natchez Trace. Berry-stained bandit Jamie Lockhart steals pioneer wilderness planter Clement Musgrove's beautiful daughter, Rosamond, away from a home dominated by his ugly, evil second wife, Salome. These and other characters are gathered together in a tale at once acid and gentle, wise and lighthearted, woven as much from the rough homespun of American history as the gossamer thread of fairy stories.

These eight stories reveal the singular imaginative power of one of America's most admired writers. Set in the Old Natchez Trace region, the stories dip in and out of history and range from virgin wilderness to a bar in New Orleans. In each story, Miss Welty sustains the high level of performance that, throughout her distinguished career, has won her numerous literary awards. "Miss Welty runs a photofinish with the finest prose artists of her time" (Time).

Welty is on home ground in the state of Mississippi in this collection of seven stories. She portrays the MacLains, the Starks, the Moodys, and other families of the fictitious town of Morgana. "I doubt that a better book about 'the South'-one that more completely gets the feel of the particular texture of Southern life and its special tone and pattern-has ever been written" (New Yorker).

The nickname of the train was the Yellow Dog. Its real name was the Yazoo-Delta. It was a mixed train. The day was the 10th of September, 1923 - afternoon. Laura McRaven, who was nine years old, was on her first journey alone. Laura McRaven travels down the Delta to attend her cousin Dabney's wedding. At the Fairchild plantation her family envelop her in a tidal wave of warmth, teases and comfort. As the big day approaches, tensions inevitably rise to the surface.

Occasions is a celebration of the short works of one of America's most beloved writers. To mark the centennial of Eudora Welty's birth, Pearl Amelia McHaney has collected more than sixty pieces by Welty (1909-2001) that are largely unknown and have not been reprinted since their first appearances in magazines, journals, newsletters, and newspapers. The gathering includes one of Welty's earliest stories, ""Acrobats in the Park""; a self-analysis of her art printed in the Twenty Photographs portfolio; a recipe for Aunt Beck's Chicken Pie served up in the novel Losing Battles; and a parody of Edmund Wilson's scurrilous New Yorker review of one of William Faulkner's late novels. These occasional essays, tributes, stories, and comments will delight readers and reveal more of the genius of a favorite author deeply engaged with her people and their customs. In these pieces Welty put pen to paper for just causes: electing honorable officials, selling war bonds, and promoting reading and the arts. Her sophistication and insight resonate in tributes to Isak Dinesen, Flannery O'Connor, and Walker Percy; in reviews of sculpture, painting, dance, and photography; and in her candid remarks about her Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Optimist's Daughter. Her sly humor emerges in ""Women!! Make Turban in Own Home!,"" a delightful parody of projects suggested in Popular Mechanics. Written between the 1930s and the 1990s, these fictions, essays, commemorations, reviews, and salutes reveal the sparkling imagination of a celebrated writer who continues her hold on a wide audience through these newfound pleasures.

With a steely comic vein, this account tells the story of three generations of descendants of the eccentric Granny Vaughn who gather in her old home in Mississippi to celebrate her 90th birthday during the hardest times of the Depression. The guest of honor will be Granny Vaughn's favorite grandson, Jack Renfro, who--not one to miss the celebration--has escaped from prison where he was expected to be released the next day. This fascinating novel describes family secrets that are mixed with stories of loss and are passed from parents to offspring, and examines a rich tapestry of a South that no longer exists. "Con una vena comica dura, este relato cuenta la historia de tres generaciones de descendientes de la excentrica abuela Vaughn que se reunen en su antiguo hogar en Misisipi para celebrar su nonagesimo cumpleanos en los momentos mas duros de la Depresion. El invitado de honor sera el nieto favorito de la abuela Vaughn, Jack Renfro, quien--para no perderse la celebracion--se ha escapado de la carcel donde esperaba ser liberado al dia siguiente. Esta novela fascinante describe los secretos de familia que se mezclan con historias de perdida y que se pasan de padres a hijos y examina un rico tapiz de un Sur que ya no existe."

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize in 1973, this novel tells the story of Laurel McKelva, a middle-aged woman who travels to New Orleans to take over for her father, a retired judge who has to undergo surgery. "Ganadora del Premio Pulitzer en 1973, esta novela narra la historia de Laurel McKelva, una mujer de mediana edad que viaja a Nueva Orleans para ayudar a su padre, un juez jubilado recien operado."

Much like her highly acclaimed One Writer's Beginnings, The Eye of the Story offers Eudora Welty's invaluable meditations on the art of writing. In addition to seven essays on craft, this collection brings together her penetrating and instructive commentaries on a wide variety of individual writers, including Jane Austen, E. M. Forster, Willa Cather, Anton Chekhov, William Faulkner, and Virginia Woolf.