In the course of 20 years, Ellen Gilchrist has established herself as one of the finest storytellers in modern southern literature. From early novels such as The Annunciation to her more recent collections of stories such as Flights of Angels, Gilchrist writes with a keen insight into the foibles of human nature while narrating the off-kilter lives of her delightfully eccentric and unforgettable characters. Suffused with wit, irony, and the bittersweet complications of love, Ellen Gilchrist's writing occupies a unique place in American fiction.

Now, with Collected Stories, her best and best-loved stories have been compiled into one volume. Selected by the author herself, this collection offers readers a retrospective of her entire career to date. Included here are pieces such as "Victory Over Japan" and "The Famous Poll at Jody's Bar," the story that introduced readers to the free-spirited Nora Jane Whittington. Simultaneously comic and searing, Gilchrist's portraits of wealthy Southern families, genteel bohemians, and marvelous female characters—such as Rhoda Manning, Miss Crystal, and Traceleen—have won her numerous fans over the years.

About the author
Ellen Gilchrist was born in the Mississippi Delta in Issaquena County. Her first job, at 14 years of age, was writing a column called "Chit and Chat About This and That" for a local Franklin, Kentucky, paper.

When she was 19, Gilchrist married engineering student Marshall Walker, by whom she had three children. After her divorce, she enrolled at Millsaps College where she took a creative writing course and began writing short stories and poetry.

Ellen Gilchrist's first collection of short stories, In the Land of Dreamy Dreams, was published by the University of Arkansas Press in 1981 and reissued in hardcover and trade paperback by Little, Brown and Company in 1985. Gilchrist's first novel, The Annunciation, was published in 1983, and her second collection of short stories, Victory Over Japan, in 1984, for which she received the National Book Award for Fiction.

Ellen Gilchrist has received numerous awards, including the Mississippi Arts Festival Poetry Award; the New York Quarterly Craft in Poetry Award; the National Endowment of the Arts Grant in Fiction; and the Mississippi Academy of Arts and Science Award for Fiction. More recently, she has received the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Literature Award three times, for In the Land of Dreamy Dreams, Victory Over Japan, and I Cannot Get You Close Enough.

Gilchrist presently lives in Fayetteville, Arkansas, and Ocean Springs, Mississippi.

Books by Ellen Gilchrist
• Collected Stories (Little, Brown & Company, 2000)
• The Cabal and Other Stories (Little, Brown & Company, 2000)
• Flights of Angels: Stories (Little, Brown & Company, 1999)
• The Age of Miracles (Little, Brown & Company, 1996)
• Victory over Japan (Little, Brown & Company, 1985)