Ann Petry’s gift for telling details, social insight, and perfectly rendered dialogue shines through in these timeless stories of aspiration, frustration, love, and prejudice in all its guises. Written over the span of Petry’s long career, these tales center on a diverse cast of African-American characters—including a precocious twelve-year-old girl, a nightclub musician in New York, and a high school English teacher. The stories capture lives of everyday hardships and casual racism, of fierce loyalties and sudden violence. In the title story, a keen-eyed young girl narrates as her aunt is courted by three men, two black and one white. In the slyly witty “The Bones of Louella Brown,” the remains of a poor black woman are accidentally mixed with those of a white aristocrat, causing outrage in 1920s Boston, while “In Darkness and Confusion” vividly recreates the Harlem riots of 1943. Unflinchingly candid and uncannily perceptive, Miss Muriel and Other Stories here takes its place among the classics of modern literature.
