Fifty Stories: The Selected Stories by Kay Boyle. 1980 Doubleday, first edition, 648 pages. Boyle was an antiwar activist and prolific short-story writer, who wrote alongside the modernists and expats of her time. She won the Guggenheim and two O'Henry awards, and was widely published in the New Yorker, although was fired from her staff position and blacklisted for a time during the red scare. As for her writing, in the New York Times obituary: "The writer Stephen Vincent Benet once described Miss Boyle's style as being 'as bright as an icicle and light as the bones of a bird.' And the critic Louis Kronenberger once contended that the fineness of her insights was 'such as no other writer of our time, in English at least, can match.'" Fifty Stories is a collection that spans her career. Condition; Jacket in good condition, chips along spine, book in good condition, wear to boards "The red carpet that was to spurt like a hemorrhage from pillar to post was stacked in the corner."
