Harold Brodkey's masterful first volume of short fiction, with two never-before anthologized stories. When originally published in 1958, First Love and Other Sorrows won Harold Brodkey widespread acclaim and announced a brilliant new arrival on the literary scene. Brodkey was hailed as an "unusually gifted writer" (The Atlantic) and a "rich talent" (San Francisco Chronicle), whose stories read like "murmured confidences, highly personal yet carefully contrived" (Chicago Tribune). In First Love and Other Sorrows, the young Brodkey chronicles the world of the educated and affluent middle class of the 1950s, at leisure and in love. He establishes the themes that would appear throughout his career--the painful uncertainties of childhood, the halting intimacies of social life--with rare terness, humor, and haunting insight. Two new stories, never before collected, from Brodkey's early writings join the original volume to complete a much-loved classic.

With The World Is the Home of Love and Death, Harold Brodkey completes the extraordinary literary voyage that began with the publication of his first short story in The New Yorker in 1952. During the past four decades, Brodkey established himself as a modern master of short fiction. In The World Is the Home of Love and Death, Brodkey returns to themes he has treated so memorably in the past--the conformity and stupefying monotony of suburbia, the malevolence of cocktail-party conversation--bringing to them a new refinement and compression. In all of these stories, Brodkey proves that there has never been a more acute translator of the language of power, coercion, and, ultimately, love. It is altogether appropriate that Brodkey's final return to fiction should be to the short story, a form that he has influenced so profoundly.