Written from the 1940s through the 1960s, these stories represent the major short works of fiction by one of the most distinctively American stylists of her day. Jean Stafford wrote of men and, especially, women alone and adrift in New York City in such stories as "Children Are Bored on Sunday"; of children surrounded by the harshness of rural Colorado and of the adults around them in "In the Zoo"; and of a young woman from Nashville bewildered and then angered by her first experience of petty French society in "Maggie Meriwether's Rich Experience." Employing a spare style that is sometimes distant, sometimes ironic, sometimes unexpectedly sharp or hilarious, the writer communicates the small details of loneliness and connection, the search for freedom and the desire to belong, that not only capture the lives of her protagonists but also convey with an elegant economy of words the places and times in which they find themselves. This volume also includes the story "An Influx of Poets," which has never before appeared in book form. -- Adapted from page [4] of cover.

"Probably the best young prose writer in the U.S.," as Time oncecalled her, Jean Stafford made a selection of her favorite among the stories she published in The New Yorker and elsewhere since 1944. Children Are Bored on Sunday displays at its height the mordant wit and sensibility which has distinguished Miss Stafford's work since her first successful novel, Boston Adventure, appeared in 1944. The stories in this book vary in mood from the title piece, a satirical examination of avant-garde intellectual life in New York through the eyes of a self-styled "rube," to the quietly affecting novella "The Home Front," about a German doctor in an American defense plant town. The backgrounds of the stories are equally varied: one is set in the Virgin Islands, two in Germany, one in Oklahoma and one in Maine, and one - "The Interior Castle" - in the featureless ether-smelling world of a hospital where the heroine is recovering after a near-fatal accident. The central figure of one story is a fat girl who imagines herself to be twins and who cannot stop eating; in another we meet Jim Littlefield, an orphan Indian boy of 8, who has "come on the train barefoot all the way from Missouri." In "The Bleeding Heart" appears an invalid old lady whose speech has lost its verbs ("I her!" she cries), while her parrot, aged 48, has lost all speech, but the eternally reiterated, "Just a minute." The versatile forms of these stories - ranging from satire to interior monologues, from pathos to grotesquerie - are carried out in a style so consistently controlled, so full of imaginative power and so alive to nuance both verbal and pictorial, that the collection takes on a compelliing unity in its very diversity, and will add to the already impressive reputation Miss Stafford's three novels have won her

One of America's best short story writers and author of three fine novels, Boston Adventure (1944), The Mountain Lion (1947), and The Catherine Wheel (1952), Jean Stafford has been rediscovered by another generation of readers and scholars. Although her novels and her Pulitzer Prize–winning short stories were widely read in the 1940s and 1950s, her fiction has received less critical attention than that of other distinguished contemporary American women writers such as Carson McCullers, Flannery O'Connor, and Eudora Welty. In this literary biography, Charlotte M. Goodman traces the life of the brilliant yet troubled Jean Stafford and reassesses her importance. Drawing on a wealth of original material, Goodman describes the vital connections between Stafford's life and her fiction. She discusses Stafford's difficult family relationships, her tempestuous first marriage to the poet Robert Lowell, her unresolved conflicts about gender roles, her alcoholism and bouts with depression—and her amazing ability to transform the chaotic details of her life into elegant works of fiction. These wonderfully crafted works offer insightful portraits of alienated and isolated characters, most of whom exemplify not only human estrangement in the modern world, but also the special difficulties of girls and women who refuse to play traditional roles. Goodman locates Jean Stafford within the literary world of the 1940s and 1950s. In her own right, and through her marriages to Robert Lowell, Life magazine editor Oliver Jensen, and journalist A. J. Liebling, Stafford associated with many of the major literary figures of her day, including the Southern Fugitives, the New York intellectual coterie, and writers for the New Yorker, to which she regularly contributed short stories. Goodman also describes Stafford's sustaining friendships with other women writers, such as Evelyn Scott and Caroline Gordon, and with her New Yorker editor, Katharine S. White. This highly readable biography will appeal to a wide audience interested in twentieth-century literature and the writing of women's lives.

'Without the networks of the French Resistance, the invasion would not have been possible' Major General Walter Bedell Smith, Chief of Staff, Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force Days after France fell in June 1940, Charles de Gaulle appointed André Dewavrin to create, from scratch, the Free French Intelligence Service. Recruiting agents among the sailors, farmers, painters, housewives and children of Occupied France, he managed cells of spies across the country, and focused their attention on one goal: preparing for the Allied invasion of France, even at the risk of torture and death. Hitler’s fortifications along the European coastline – known as the Atlantic Wall – were their target. Gun battery locations, troop movements, and more... All this information was funnelled back to the Allies by a network of brave individuals, creating a living map that became essential to the planning of D-Day, and the selection of Normandy as the invasion point. Using a wealth of material both published and unpublished, including interviews with Dewavrin and de Gaulle himself, Collier has produced an authentic record of one of the most remarkable episodes of the Second World War; a human story of a group of ordinary people whose faith paved the way for Eisenhower’s great sweep across Europe. Perfect for readers of Antony Beevor and Max Hastings.

When a bored girl meets a potato who finds children tedious, she tries to prove him wrong by demonstrating all of the things they can do, from turning cartwheels to using their imaginations. Full color.

Two-volume set that presents an introduction to American short fiction from the 19th century to the present.

The works of fifty of our finest authors pooled together in a single treasury.

Children always have questions, and they have many questions at a young age. This book is about a little boy that had a question. He wanted to understand why he had to go to church on Sundays. He thought it was just another day, but Mom explained why this day was so special.