In a career spanning five decades, Eudora Welty has chronicled her own Mississippi with a depth and intensity matched only by William Faulkner.

Kate DiCamillo picked this as one of her favorites in WSIRN episode 213. She says she goes back to these stories all the time for the insight into humanity, rereading them every year, ever since she was assigned Eudora Welty in college. She especially recommended "A Visit of Charity" to me but suggests you start with the first story and move to the end. Kate called every story "a gift in a different way." Ann Patchett writes the intro to this new edition. From the publisher: "The forty-one pieces collected in this new edition, written over a period of three decades, showcase Welty’s incredible dexterity as a writer. Her style seamlessly shifts from the comic to the tragic, from realistic portraits to surrealistic ones, as she deftly moves between folklore and myth, race and history, family and farce, and the Mississippi landscape she knew so well, her wry wit and keen sense of observation always present on the page."

Counting both Kate DiCamillo and Rory Gilmore as fans of the same author is high praise. Remember when Rory paid tribute to Lorelai in her graduation speech: "She filled our house with love and fun and books and music, unflagging in her efforts to give me role models from Jane Austen to Eudora Welty to Patti Smith." It's just possible The Golden Apples, Welty's collection of short stories, was on the Gilmore bookshelves. And DiCamillo says she goes back to Welty's stories all the time for the insight into humanity; Kate called every story "a gift in a different way."

From the publisher: "From one of the most treasured American writers, winner of a National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize, comes a vivid and charming portrait of Southern life. Set in 1923, the story is centered on the Fairchilds, a big and clamorous family, who live on a plantation in the Mississippi delta. They are in the midst of planning their daughter’s wedding when a nine-year-old relative, Laura McRaven, whose mother has just died, comes to visit. Drama leads to drama, revelation to revelation, in a novel that is “nothing short of wonderful” (The New Yorker). The result is a sometimes-riotous view of a Southern family, and the parentless child who learns to become one of them."

From the publisher: "Here is a baker’s dozen of Welty’s very best, including: “The Wide Net,” in which a pregnant wife threatens to drown herself, despite fear of the water, and a communal dragging of the river turns into a celebratory fish-fry; “Petrified Man,” revealing the savagery of small-town gossip; “Powerhouse,” Welty’s prose answer to jazz improvisation and the emotional heart of the blues; and “Why I Live at the P.O.”, the hilariously one-sided testimony of a postmistress who believes herself wronged by her family. With her highly tuned ear and sharp insight into human behavior, Eudora Welty has crafted stories as vital and unpredictable as they are artful and enduring." Sue Monk Kidd says, "I’ve read her Thirteen Stories many times, and I’m always awed by how much comedy, pathos, satire and lyricism she manages to squeeze into her stories."