Miss Muriel and Other Stories

"Petry is the writer we have been waiting for; hers are the stories we need to fully illuminate the questions of our moment, while also offering a page-turning good time. Ann Petry, the woman, had it all, & so does her insightful, prescient & unputdownable prose." — Tayari Jones, New York Times Book Review

From the author of the bestselling novel The Street, comes a powerful collection of stories that captures a remarkably diverse panorama of African American experience in the 1950s & 1960s.

A small-town pharmacist’s decision to take a day off leads his wife to an agonizing encounter with the police. A retired Black college professor teaching at a predominately white high school is kidnapped & forced to witness an unthinkable horror. A young Black girl watches her aunt’s suitors threaten her family’s wellbeing, with repercussions that reverberate for decades. 

Ann Petry wrote these & the other extraordinary stories in this collection over half a century ago, but the problems they interrogate still exist today, incisively uncovering the consequences of America’s pervasive racism, while telling timeless stories of everyday lives, of aspiration, frustration, & love. 

Originally published between 1945 & 1971, Petry’s stories are “a delicate, unflinching probe into African-American existence” (Boston Globe) & an assertion of her status as one of the most gifted writers of the twentieth century. 

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Ann Petry was the acclaimed author of the adult novel The Street, a groundbreaking literary work about life in Harlem, which sold over a million copies. She also wrote several books for young readers, including Harriet Tubman: Conductor on the Underground Railroad, the story of the courageous & heroic woman who struggled & fought for her people before & during the Civil War.