"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, Stafford 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 acclaimed story "An Influx of Poets," which has never before appeared in book form."--Jacket.