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jacket image for Mrs. Darcy and the Blue-Eyed Stranger

Mrs. Darcy and the Blue-Eyed Stranger

Hardback , 368 pages
ISBN: 9781565129153 (1565129156)
Published by Algonquin Books
$23.95(US)

about Mrs. Darcy and the Blue-Eyed Stranger

A celebrated novelist, Lee Smith is likewise recognized as a master of the short story and has been compared with such luminaries as Katherine Ann Porter, Eudora Welty, and Flannery O’Connor. Now she collects fourteen stories—seven brand-new ones along with seven favorites from her three earlier collections. The result? A book of dazzling richness.

Famous for unmistakable voices and a craft so strong and sure it seems effortless, Lee Smith’s stories strike dead center at the turning points of her characters’ lives. Here those characters range from an eight-year-old boy obsessed with vocabulary words to a young bride who has married "way up" to Mrs. Darcy herself, an older woman making it through widowhood her own way. As the New York Times Book Review put it, "In almost every one of [her stories] there is a moment of vision, or love, or unclothed wonder that transforms something plain into something transcendent."

With this collection—her first in thirteen years—Smith reclaims her place as the reigning queen of the bittersweet short story.


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about Lee Smith

Lee Smith is the author of fifteen previous books of fiction—three collections of short stories and a dozen novels. The recipient of the 1999 Academy Award in Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, she lives in Hillsborough, North Carolina.
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