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“Up among the stars or at home in small towns in North Carolina, Betts displays equally a rich imagination and a disturbing vision.”—New York Times Book Review All but one of these seven stories and one novella take place in small towns in North Carolina, and all of them concern ordinary people teetering upon the knowledge of their own insignificance. In the opening story, “Spies in the Herb House,” lonely, imaginative eight-year-old Doris who yearns to be noticed and always remembered by her fellow townspeople believes that the Nazis have surreptitiously appropriated an abandoned building and have found her out in her discovery. In “Careful, Sharp Eggs Underfoot,” fifty-eight-year-old attorney Wink Thomas tries to stanch the demise of Parsonsville by instituting Egg Day—a celebration of the area’s primary (and solitary) industry—envisioning a flood of fortune and national fame for the town. The title novella, “The Astronomer,” tells of Horton Beam, a just-retired textile mill worker with no living relatives and no plans. On a whim he decides to become an astronomer—the kind who sticks strictly to the facts—and just as arbitrarily he agrees to take in two roomers, even while regretting the invasion of his privacy. But Beam gradually becomes absorbed in the lives of his boarders as well as the myths of the stars, opening himself to questions about love, forgiveness, loneliness, and faith that he thought at his stage in life he’d finally set aside. First published in 1965, this second collection of short fiction by Doris Betts evinces her breathtaking mastery of the genre.
Doris Betts is the author ofSouls Raised from the Dead, Heading West, and four other works of fiction. She is recipient of the Medal of Merit for the Short Story, awarded by the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and is Alumni Distinguished Professor of English at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
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