THE GOLDEN APPLES

In the field of modern American writing, Eudora Welty's name bears the hallmark of greatness. In her latest volume of short stories, Mississippi set, Miss Welty writes on kaleidoscopic planes; her style is at once erratic, nervous, calm, sinister, surrealistic, passionate, atmospheric, deadly real or just plain beautiful. Ostensibly these are short stories but actually the volume becomes a series of soldered, cold-clear incidents pinned together by the same locale and the same people. There is the delightfully conversational, astute Shower of Gold; the complex, subtle June Recital which presents the pathetic figure of a music teacher named Miss Eckhart,- her sensitivity, her shyness, her aberrations, her hallucinations. Moon Lake is a horror tale in the best miasma-swamp tradition and as a sideline, gets the fibers of the adolescent mind. The symbolic Music from Spain takes place in San Francisco and creates a dream world on the city's streets as two friends find unspoken release together... All of these stories are perceptive, intelligent, thoroughly creative and deserving of critical appreciation.