Miss Muriel and Other Stories

<p><strong>“Petry is the writer we have been waiting for; hers are the stories we need to fully illuminate the questions of our moment, while also offering a page-turning good time. Ann Petry, the woman, had it all, and so does her insightful, prescient and unputdownable prose.” — Tayari Jones, <em>New York Times Book Review</em></strong></p><p><strong>From the author of the bestselling novel <em>The Street, </em>comes a powerful collection of stories that captures a remarkably diverse panorama of African American experience in the 1950s and 1960s.</strong></p><p>A<strong> </strong>small-town pharmacist’s decision to take a day off leads his wife to an agonizing encounter with the police. A retired Black college professor teaching at a predominately white high school is kidnapped and forced to witness an unthinkable horror. A young Black girl watches her aunt’s suitors threaten her family’s wellbeing, with repercussions that reverberate for decades. Ann Petry wrote these and the other extraordinary stories in this collection<em> </em>over half a century ago, but the problems they interrogate still exist today, incisively uncovering the consequences of America’s pervasive racism, while telling timeless stories of everyday lives, of aspiration, frustration, and love. <em>Miss Muriel and Other </em>Stories is “a delicate, unflinching probe into African-American existence” (<em>Boston Globe</em>) from one of the most gifted writers of the twentieth century. Originally published between 1945 and 1971, Petry’s stories are “a delicate, unflinching probe into African-American existence” (<em>Boston Globe</em>) and an assertion of her status as one of the most gifted writers of the twentieth century. </p><p><strong>“I’ve recently had my brain re-wired by Ann Petry, and it’s that exhilarating feeling of falling in love with one of your lifetime writers for the first time.” —Brandon Tyler</strong></p>