The Stories of J.F. Powers

By J.F. Powers
Introduction by Denis Donoghue

Hailed by Frank O'Connor as one of "the greatest living storytellers," J. F. Powers, who died in 1999, stands with Eudora Welty, Flannery O'Connor, and Raymond Carver among the authors who have given the short story an unmistakably American cast. In three slim collections of perfectly crafted stories, published over a period of some thirty years and brought together here in a single volume for the first time, Powers wrote about many things: baseball and jazz, race riots and lynchings, the Great Depression, and the flight to the suburbs. His greatest subject, however—and one that was uniquely his—was the life of priests in Chicago and the Midwest. Powers's thoroughly human priests, who include do-gooders, gladhanders, wheeler-dealers, petty tyrants, and even the odd saint, struggle to keep up with the Joneses in a country unabashedly devoted to consumption.

These beautifully written, deeply sympathetic, and very funny stories are an unforgettable record of the precarious balancing act that is American life.

Table of Contents
The Lord's Day
The Trouble
Lions, Harts, Leaping Does
Jamesie
He Don't Plant Cotton
The Forks
Renner
The Valiant Woman
The Eye
The Old Bird, A Love Story
Prince of Darkness
Dawn
Death of a Favorite
The Poor Thing
The Devil Was the Joke
A Losing Game
Defection of a Favorite
Zeal
Blue Island
The Presence of Grace
Look How the Fish Live
Bill
Folks
Keystone
One of Them
Moonshot
Priestly Fellowship
Farewell
Pharisees
Tinkers

Read the introduction (PDF)

Reviews

...[Powers's] small output...has attracted something of a cult following.
— New York Times

Powers's eye is ruthless, with something of a child's icy, microscopic freshness, and with fascination one senses behind his work the weight of a childhood spent in Catholic schools...
— Donna Tartt, Harper's

Power's prose is consistently superb - rare but not thinned by mandarinism, richly metaphorical but never unbudgeted in its wealth, each sentence a pondered finality. The slightest phrases bloom...
— James Wood, The New Yorker

A one man show at the top-level of short-story writing. Of a rare, indeed almost unique perfection among short stories of this half-century.
— Sean O'Faolain

Powers is a genuine original. Read him . . . for the pleasures he bestows of ear and eye, but read him too for the supreme trustworthiness of his vision, a trust earned by impeccable craft, and by a balance perfectly struck between a cutting irony and a beleaguered faith.
— Mary Gordon

Also see:

Morte D'Urban By J.F. Powers Introduction by Elizabeth Hardwick This beautifully observed, often hilarious tale of a most unlikely Knight of Faith is among the finest achievements of an author whose singular vision assures him a permanent place in American literature.

Wheat That Springeth Green By J.F. Powers Introduction by Katherine A. Powers Wheat That Springeth Green, J. F. Powers's beautifully realized final work, is a comic foray into the commercialized wilderness of modern American life.

Randall Jarrell's Book of Stories Edited by Randall Jarrell This wonderful anthology, with its celebrated introductory essay, enlarges and deepens our perception of the storyteller's art and its central place in the world of our feelings.

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