BEST OF THE BEST

From the Martha Foley annual collections, some twenty-five stories which make a perennial bid for posterity and which represent the contemporary short story field at its highest level of achievement. There's a lot of serious- to somber- writing here; Sherwood Anderson; Erskine Caldwell; Pietro di Donato's Christ in Concrete Faulkner and Albert Maltz and Irwin Shaw; there's Ernest Hemingway's My Old Man and Ring Lardner's Haircut; there's an ingratiating Judge Priest story by Irvin S. Cobb and John Cheever's frightening fancy The Enormous Radio. Kay Boyle, Dorothy Canfield, Jean Stafford and Eudora Welty make up a small minority of women, while Nelson Algren, Walter van Tilburg Clark, Paul Horgan, J. F. Powers, Wilbur Daniel Steele, Wallace Stegner, Jesse Stuart, Peter Taylor and James Thurber complete the cavalcade. A definitive item, for a definite audience.