Lee Smith reads from her new story collection: Mrs Darcy and the Blue Eyed Stranger

Saturday 5/8 7pm-8pm  (moved from 4/9/10)

Lee Smith reads from her new story collection: 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.

PRAISE FOR PREVIOUS COLLECTIONS:

“Lee Smith is a writer’s writer, a teller of tales for tale tellers to admire and envy. She’s also a reader’s dream. She knows what she’s doing, and she does it very, very well.”

—Houston Chronicle

“Marvelously entertaining . . . These are stories you want to read again to catch all the things you missed the first time around.”

—The Boston Globe

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.