On 21 April 1930 Ford Madox Ford humorously replied to a request for a piece of short fiction: "Alas, though modesty is foreign to my nature I know that I cannot do certain things; the understanding of the Higher Mathematics is one; swimming under water another. But great as is my incapacity in those sports it is as nothing to my inability to write a short story. Had I ever been able to I should today be a rich man. But I can't."

His self-deprecation is misleading. Beside his major achievements in other genres--novels, poetry, essays, criticism, memoirs, social history--Ford's short stories have simply never received the attention they deserve. He wrote more than seventy stories, at least half of which were published in his lifetime--in Christina's Fairy Book (1906) and Zeppelin Nights: A London Entertainment (1915), as well as in various periodicals. The unpublished stories include juvenilia and fragments; not all...