All Day Night

All Day Night

From the American Book Award-winning author of Ancestors and Time Will Darken comes a masterful collection of stories, spanning more than 50 years–a tour of a world that engages readers entirely, and whose characters command the deepest commitment and tenderness.

Review”William Maxwell’s tales, long and short, have the elusive capacity to disclose us to ourselves, taking us beyond the frozen moment of perfection and guiding us gently into the wonder of uncertainty” Erica Wagner, The Times; “A writer of astounding stature” Eileen Battersby, Irish Times; “Maxwell’s sensible prose is the good and careful tool of an artisan who is always doing incisively what he means to do” Eudora Welty

From the Inside FlapFrom the American Book Award-winning author of Ancestors and Time Will Darken comes a masterful collection of stories, spanning more than 50 years–a tour of a world that engages readers entirely, and whose characters command the deepest dedication and tenderness.

All Day Night Picture

All Day Night Picture

All Day Night Image

All Day Night Photo

Most helpful client reviews

19 of 19 humans found the following review helpful.
American Bible
By M Alexander
This, like the Bible, is a book of two halves: one long and comparatively weighty, the other short and attractively simple.
The original percentage is Maxwell’s gathered stories, chosen to represent a amount of time of time stretching from the thirties to the nineties. These all, to varying degrees follow the trademark Maxwell approach of hovering on the edges of fiction and biography. Some (The Man in the Moon, Billie Dyer) appear to be straight non-fiction, while in others the constituents of fiction are stronger. All, however, are powerful evocations of the humane landscape of Maxwell’s childhood, or of the experiences of later life.
The second portion of the work is a collection of what Maxwell calls “improvisations”: fables or fairy stories which contrast strikingly with his more intimate naturalistic pieces. The connecting thread is his moving clarity of vision. Most of these stories are only a few pages long, but they combine humour and humanity in a way which makes them a permanent percentage of the reader’s mind.
All the Days and Nights is a fantasti book, which for those intimate with Maxwell’s longer works offers, in the best sense, more of the same. Or, for those new to the author, the improvisations in queer are an enticing and accessible introduction to one of America’s best 20th century writers.

9 of 10 people found the following review helpful.
beautiful portraits of general life
By Daniel Juliano
These short stories are best read slowly. They contained lovingly elaborated characters, characters that require you to spend the time to get to recognise them. Maxwell examines a heap of rather frequent people in their popular life struggles. But he does so insightfully and lovingly. The “improvisations” at the end of the book are rather unique, and their genesis (improvised bedtime stories to his wife) mesh perfectly with the themes of the rest of the stories.

8 of 9 persons found the following review helpful.
powerful images
By A
I’ve read this book at University as I’m doing a Master on Translation. My teacher is the “official translator” of this book in Spain, so she asked us to translate a couple of short stories: “The Sound of Waves” and “All the Days and Nights”. I have to say that I’ve liked it very much. It’s amazing how Maxwell may make us see those images he has in his mind by words in a very clear way. I’m reading now the rest of the stories, but I may tell I have ran into one of my favourite authors!!!

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