Optimist's Daughter (Welty)

Book Reviews
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The Optimist's Daughter, which first appeared in The New Yorker of March 15, 1969, is a miracle of compression, the kind of book, small in scope but profound in its implications.... Its story has all those qualities peculiar to the finest short novels: a theme that vibrates with overtones, suspense and classical inevitability. Known as a "Southern regionalist," Miss Welty is too good for pigeonholing labels. Though she has stayed close to home, two interlocking notions have been demonstrated in her fiction: how easily the ordinary turns into legend, and how firmly the exotic is grounded in the banal....the best book Eudora Welty has ever written.
Howard Moss - The New York Times