I Cannot Tell a Lie, Exactly: And Other Stories

It is the stuff of fiction: A collection of stories, never made public, is lost in a drawer for thirty years until, miraculously, the stories are discovered and published. It is also the true story of the book you are holding in your hands. Mary Ladd Gavell died in 1967 at the age of forty-seven, having published nothing in her lifetime. She was the managing editor of "Psychiatry "magazine in Washington, D.C., and after her death, her colleagues ran her story "The Rotifer" in the magazine as a tribute. The story was, somehow, plucked from that nonliterary journal and selected for The Best American Short Stories 1967. And again, thirty-three years later, "The Rotifer" emerged from near obscurity when John Updike selected it for The Best American Short Stories of the Century. In his Introduction to that collection, Updike called Gavell's story a "gem" and said that her writing was "feminism in literary action." "The Rotifer" has remained, until now, Gavell's only published work. The sixteen stories collected here include the anthologized classic "The Rotifer," in which a young woman learns the extent to which a bit of innocent interference, or the refusal to interfere, can change the course of lives. "The Swing" depicts a mother's strange reconnection to her adult son's childhood as she is summoned outside, night after night, by the creak of his old swing. "Baucis" introduces a woman longing for widowhood who is cheated of the respite she craves and whose last words are tragically misunderstood by her family. The title story, based on the last-minute announcement by Gavell's own son that he was in a school play, is infused with the gentle humor and vivid insights that make allof Mary Ladd Gavell's stories timeless and utterly beguiling. With the publication of I Cannot Tell a Lie, Exactly, Mary Ladd Gavell takes her rightful place among the best writers of her, and our, time.

Review :
"I was first gripped by the very idea of stories published posthumously, by an author's dream unrealized in her lifetime. But now it is the stories themselves, stunning and so precise, that capture me. Funny, sad, acerbic, and fresh, I Cannot Tell a Lie, Exactly has a place of honor on my shelf of favorite and unforgettable books. Long live Mary Ladd Gavell." --Elinor Lipman "The stories seem to slide through the mind sideways, leaving in their wake a sense both of unfulfilled promise and of greatness. Gavell might have provided us, had she lived a bit longer and had she been recognized, stories that would have ranked with the very best American literature has to offer. That she did not, and that we have only these gems, is almost more poignant than one can bear." --Anita Shreve "[These stories] belong to the ageless, classic grand era of the modern American short story." --from the Introduction by Kaye Gibbons