Winner of the 1970 Pulitzer Prize for fiction, this collection of thirty stories includes some of Jean Stafford’s best short fiction from the period 1944 to 1968. Including such favorites as “In the Zoo,” “Children Are Bored on Sunday,” and “Beatrice Trueblood’s Story,” the collection offers the work of this popular writer of the 1940s and 1950s to a new generation of readers and critics.
Jean Stafford (1915–1979) was the author of three novels, as well as several children’s and nonfiction books.
Joyce Carol Oates is a recipient of the National Medal of Humanities, the National Book Critics Circle Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award, the National Book Award, and the 2019 Jerusalem Prize, and has been several times nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. She has written some of the most enduring fiction of our time, including the national bestsellers We Were the Mulvaneys; Blonde, which was nominated for the National Book Award; and the New York Times bestseller The Falls, which won the 2005 Prix Femina. She is the Roger S. Berlind Distinguished Professor of the Humanities at Princeton University and has been a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters since 1978.
Elisabeth Rodgers is an actress and AudioFile Earphones Award–winning narrator. After graduating from Princeton University, she completed a two-year program at William Esper Studio, where she studied with Maggie Flanigan. Her audiobook narration training came from Robin Miles, who has also directed her in several productions. She has recorded dozens of books for a multitude of publishers.