There is a special joy in seeing a virtuoso at work, achieving the fulfillment of his art. In a prodigious literary career, demonstrating a virtually limitless range, George Garrett's dazzling versatility has won high esteem and critical acclaim for his novels, plays, poetry, biography, and short fiction. Now, as testimony to George Garrett's vivid storytelling powers, An Evening's Performance: New and Selected Short Stories encompasses some of his best work of the past thirty years.Widely admired for his masterworks of Elizabethan times, Garrett's stories here are contemporary, colloquial, humorous, bittersweet, deeply felt without sentimentality. Garrett's gift for language, his forthright and compelling style touch the heart and ignite the senses, as he gives us stories of war and uneasy peace; of soldiers and movie-makers; of families, ghosts, preachers, teachers, and religious conmen. Stories that create a vision quintessentially American, yet universal in...

"I have read Death of the Fox," writes O. B. Hardison, Director of The Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D. C., "and feel that I have probably participated at the inception of a major literary event. The novel is a brilliant and unique work. I know of nothing quite like it in recent American fiction. It is wholly conversant with the fiber, texture, and grain of Elizabethan and Jacobean England. In its sweep it takes us from the arrival of the Tudors in 1485 all the way to October 29, 1618, when Ralegh was executed. It covers . . . the policy, the religious disputes, the warfare, the rivalries of various political factions, the magic of Queen Elizabeth and the crafty folly of James I, Essex and Bacon, Leicester and Sir Edward Coke, Marlow and Ben Jonson and Inigo Jones! Incredibly, it is all these, not only in broad sweep, but in an infinitude of jewel-like details, each meticulously exact, but at the same time adding up to a sort of literary mosaic, creating an artistic...