Where the Light Falls: Selected Stories of Nancy Hale

Where the Light Falls: Selected Stories by Nancy Hale
Edited by Lauren Groff
(Library of America; in bookstores September 24, 2019. Preorders Ship now. )

“Nancy Hale’s touch was so precise and delicate that you might think you’re reading undiscovered Edith Wharton stories. Seen anew in Lauren Groff’s excellent selection, these stories are very much of-the-moment. What an exhilarating book!”—Ann Beattie

“Esteemed in her lifetime but largely forgotten today, short story master Hale (1908–1988 ) gets a welcome reintroduction in this collection of 25 astute, finely wrought tales. . . . Classic examples of the art of short fiction, capturing the variety of human experience with sophisticated economy.”—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

Nancy Hale

A teenage girl in Connecticut driven to near delirium over her burgeoning sexuality. A twenty-something New Yorker transplanted to a small Virginia community who boldly befriends the town pariah. A New England widow in search of alcohol and excitement while babysitting her grandson. A Maryland socialite who has built a secret bomb shelter that becomes the center of her imaginative life

These are some of the characters who inhabit Nancy Hale’s lush fiction. Haunting, vivid, and wonderfully subversive, Hale’s stories typically concern women recognizable to all of us—sometimes fragile, possibly wicked, deceptively ordinary, navigating their way uncertainly through life. Nancy Hale was one of the most accomplished short story artists of her era, winner of ten O. Henry Awards and a frequent contributor to The New Yorker from the 1930s to the 1960s. But by the time of her death in 1988, this remarkable writer, so far ahead of her time in her depiction of complex women, was largely forgotten. Now Lauren Groff reintroduces this modern master with a selection of twenty-five of her best stories—brilliant short fiction that encompasses childhood and adolescence, marriage and motherhood, desire and infidelity, madness and memory.

Where the Light Falls reveals Hale as a gifted stylist—a painter in light and shadow—and an acute observer of modern American life.

Nancy Hale (1908–1988), born in Boston to a family whose forebears include Revolutionary War hero Nathan Hale and Harriet Beecher Stowe, was the author of eight novels, including the best-selling The Prodigal Women, four short story collections, two memoirs, two plays, children’s stories, and a biography of Mary Cassatt. With the writer Elizabeth Coles Langhorne, she was a co-founder of the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts.

Lauren Groff

Lauren Groff is the New York Times–best-selling author of three novels, The Monsters of Templeton, Arcadia

and Fates and Furies, and two short story collections, Delicate Edible Birds and Florida.

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