This is Cather’s second collection of short stories. I think, with The Troll Garden coming out so early in her career, she kind of wanted a do-over, so this book contains four new stories and four stories from The Troll Garden. Cather picks the right four from The Troll Garden for sure and reorders them so that this book actually ends with the best story from The Troll Garden, also the best story in this book, the brilliantly painful A Death in the Desert. She has, I should note, revised the stories from The Troll Garden and I think she’s overdone her revision of A Wagner Matinee; she’s stripped a lot of the more abstract language out of it, going for a kind of more grounded style, though it is still beautiful. Of the four new stories, Coming, Aphrodite is the best, I’d say; it’s a genuinely character based look at a romance between two young artists and the ways that they self-sabotage. It has a perfect ending in my opinion. The book is cleverly arranged, really, with the two best stories filling both the first and last slots. It’s better on the whole than The Troll Garden and I’d recommend this as the better starting place if you’re interested in Cather’s short stories. 3 ½ stars.
tl;dr – book collects both new & previously published short stories to make a great collection; more polished than her first collection, it’s a brilliantly curated book. 3 ½ stars.