A collection of Penn Warren's best short fiction: two novelettes and twelve stories that skillfully handle a variety of themes and styles."Worth reading for their craftsmanship and variety" (Charles Poore, New York Times).

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Excerpt from The Circus in the Attic: And Other Stories The new war had not yet become real in the summer of 1917. The bandages prepared at Red Cross meetings in the basement of the St. Luke's parish house or m the Sunday school room of the Baptist Church seemed to have no more importance than the baskets prepared there for the poor be fore Christmas. The tears shed by mothers and sweethearts at the railroad station seemed to be no different from the tears shed when a boy went off to school or college. No armless khaki sleeve had' yet appeared on the streets of Bardsville. So the tumescent, rich, meaningless emotionalism that ached sweetly in the breasts of the middle - aged ladies of the com munity found release and focus in the monument. The United Daughters of the Confederacy, the defenders of ancient pieties and the repositories of ignorance of history, undertook to raise the money. Bardsville had had heroes before, and it would have them again. Soon now. The monument would be an inspiration to the new heroes. So the monument appeared, and was dedicated, and While the mayor made a speech, a platoon of conscripts from a camp up in Kentucky, in untarnished khaki, with slick, scrubbed faces, stood stitfly by with the wooden embarrassment of boys trapped on the platform at high-school commencement. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

The popularity of the circus in the United States reached its zenith in the early 1900s; as the century progressed, the circus gradually came to reflect traditional American values. In this book, Patricia L. Bradley analyzes the extent to which Warren's 1947 novella "The Circus in the Attic" and its use of the circus trope establishes a critical matrix for interpreting his fiction, poetry, essays, and literary criticism.