Listening And Speaking

"These are stories at once tender and unsparing; they have to do with those human beings whom life has damaged in mind, in psyche. Here the lost are given their understanding-these stories have found them. Skilled, sensitive, daring in their reach, they are clearly the work of a born writer."

Eudora Welty

"These brilliantly crafted stories indulge in salient detail and proceed at a pace that gently leads to reversals at once contingent and fateful. Each piece invites and rewards multiple re-readings, which reveal how closeness rarely resolves into comfortable nearness, how proximity can often be most distant."

John T. Hamilton

"Some of Ellen Wilbur's stories take wing, as songs and lyric poems. are meant to do; others remain earthbound for excellent reasons of their own. What they have in common is that all of them are told in a fresh, pure, original voice that deserves to be widely and gratefully heard."

Richard Yates

"Ellen Wilbur' is an outstanding voice in fiction. She speaks in many tongues."

Gail Godwin

"It is as if a light shines through the stories of Ellen Wilbur. They are so marvelously clear, precise and yet profound in feeling; richly resonant and alive with an amazing marriage of subtle music and high energy. And yet the greatest wonder of all is their variety. She is a rare writer, in this age of so much uniformity and conformity, who can create many kinds and shapes of short fiction with ease and with equal art. She has great gifts and with this collection takes her place among the best of us."

George Garrett

"Ellen Wilbur's stories moved me as lovely music does: filled me with sorrow and loneliness, yet elevated me as well to the solitude where we receive the strength and blessing of art. Her music is her prose, and the heart it comes from."

Andre Dubus

"Ellen Wilbur's stories have a gravity, a graceful seriousness that makes them as satisfying as little novels. What intrigues me about her writing is that, without tricks or flamboyance, she goes in such unpredictable directions. One after another the stories turn out to be about something you didn't suspect when you began, something more fragmentary but usually more profound. My favorites... are complete and full of surprises of phrase and feeling.

Rosellen Brown