Many people refuse to read short fiction, but what they don’t understand is that the important part is the fiction, not the length. Being able to tell a story with a modicum of words is an absolute talent that not every book-length author possesses, but Porter loosely fictionalized a gut-wrenching account of her own struggle with the Spanish Flu in the eponymous story. I remember reading this collection in college and being shocked that this cataclysmic event that killed millions of people happened and I hadn’t until that moment really learned about the pandemic. Of course, there are echoes to what we are going through today, and when I started writing my own pandemic novel, I went back to Pale Horse, Pale Rider for inspiration.
From the gothic Old South to revolutionary Mexico, few writers have evoked such a multitude of worlds, both exterior and interior, as powerfully as Katherine Anne Porter. This collection gathers together the best of her Pulitzer Prize-winning short fiction, including 'Pale Horse, Pale Rider', where a young woman lies in a fever during the influenza epidemic, her childhood memories mingling with fears for her fiance on his way to war, and 'Noon Wine', a haunting story of tragedy and scandal on a small dairy farm in Texas. In all of the compelling stories collected here, harsh and tragic truths are expressed in prose both brilliant and precise.
Katherine Anne Porter's short stories are unsurpassed in modern fiction -- Robert Penn Porter writes English of a purity and precision almost unique in contemporary fiction -- Edmund Wilson She solves the essential problem: how to satisfy exhaustively in writing briefly -- V.S. Pritchett Porter's stories take accurate and deadly aim... dazzling - The New York Times
