SOURCE: Reynolds, Susan Salter. “Discoveries.” Los Angeles Times Book Review (24 December 2000): 11.

In the following favorable review of Collected Stories, Reynolds outlines the strengths of Gilchrist's short fiction writing.

“A full moon was caught like a kite in the pecan trees across the river.” Mysterious, beautiful, ominous, rich, perfect. “The low-hanging clouds pushed against each other in fat cosmic orgasms.” Heavy-handed, jarring, distracting, mixed beyond usefulness. This is why you buy short-story collections by writers you've enjoyed: to see the many variations in their writing to get a sense of their evolution sometimes over decades, to boil their writing down to a haiku of questions they've asked in various ways and answers they've offered. Also to discover new things. Reading this collection of stories handpicked by Ellen Gilchrist [Collected Stories], I was struck by the power of her last lines, the way she builds on readers' expectations and then...