Still working through these but I do love Ms. Welty. She’s strange and violent and her Southern sensibility resonates for me. These stories have a slightly old-fashioned feel—there’s a bit more of that psychological telling than we like in our more contemporary stories, but oh, she makes me laugh out loud sometimes. “Why I Live At the P.O.” is a story I could read a hundred times in a row and probably not get sick of. She’s just funny, and she’s funny with a brilliant double-edged characterization that is straight out of small towns as I have personally experienced them.

Her writing is beautiful. The sensual minutia is startlingly intimate. But the depiction and the treatment of people of color, and the antiquated words used to describe them, jarred me out of the beauty time and time again. One could say, "well, it was accurate for that time period in the South," which I would grant as true, but there would be ways of imparting that without making the white characters totally fleshed out and the black characters only shallow caricatures. It was a shame, because I think that if she wrote them as beautifully as she did the ever-present crape myrtle trees, it would have been wonderful.
One other thing I need to mention though, was the writing of violence. It was quiet, and un-pretty. It was naked, and sudden, and, I feel horribly accurate. It looked you in the eye, slew, then walked away with barely a glance back. I was never romanticized, and yet it was woven seamlessly with images that were very romantic. It was better than any "glorious battle" scene I ever read because it was so silent and present and real.

A Curtain of Green certainly doesn't read like the first stories of a new writer. Except for a few in anthologies, (like the great "Why I Live at the P.O." and "Death of a Traveling Salesman," both included here) this is my first time reading her short stories, and I can't believe it took me this long to get to her. (May 10, 2008)

The Wide Net is another wonderful collection. Each story, except one (which is set in a bar in New Orleans), is set in and around the Natchez Trace, including a couple of very interesting ones with historical figures as characters (Aaron Burr in one, Audubon in another, as well as real lesser-knowns) and another (possibly my favorite) that uses Greek mythological elements and a Greek chorus for the contemporary story of the town "Queen," a Hera-like harridan. The final story is heartbreaking. (July 23, 2011)

Dense and allusive, The Golden Apples is a tour de force: a short-story cycle that could be discussed endlessly, with its references to mythology, folklore, the nature of time and gender, escaping time and gender, and much more. Perhaps I wasn't always sure of what Welty was getting at when I was in the midst of a story, but by story's end, I marveled at the brilliance.
(July 6, 2012)

Though maybe not the masterpiece the previous collection is, The Bride of Innisfallen is also the work of a master storyteller. The themes that bind this collection are perhaps subtle, but they are there, and the style of many of the stories is quite modern. Welty's way with dialogue and turns-of-phrase is impeccable. (July 23, 2012)

The two 'uncollected stories' (written in the early 60's) that end this volume say much more than they might seem to say, and are further evidence of Welty's keen eye, now trained on the changing times.

I really can’t bring myself to rate this because I feel like I’m missing something here… I know it’s blasphemous to some for me to say this, but I neither like nor dislike Eudora Welty. She feels kind of like Alice Munro’s predecessor— another writer I can learn to appreciate but can’t love.
Eudora Welty is now a writer I can add to my category of “short story writers who everyone seems to love except for me” along with Denis Johnson, Raymond Carver, and David Foster Wallace.

I gave this an attempt, reading four of the short stories, before deciding I just don't like it all that much. At the end of the stories I either had to make sure it was really the end, or found myself saying, "Huh?" Maybe that's more of a commentary on my ability to be intellectual than on Welty's ability to write a good story for me. Her style of writing is actually quite amazing, for the most part. It was the point of the stories or the endings that I felt were really not speaking to me.

This is dense, thought-provoking, emotional stuff. Hard to get through the whole thing very quickly (almost had to renew it from the library a second time).