It seems auspicious that two works representing the best of Caroline Gordon's art, The Collected Stories and a new edition of Aleck Maury, Sportsman, should be published so close together and so near the time of Gordon's death. These two books are the ones for which we will most likely remember her. Aleck Maury is clearly her masterwork, and The Collected Stories is, with a few exceptions, a collection of superb, often flawless short fiction. Any doubt that Gordon was a master craftsman is laid to rest with these two volumes, particularly The Collected Stories, where, in one finely wrought story after another, she captures the exquisite complexity of life and the imagination.

As the collection of her stories shows, Gordon's most noteworthy achievement as a writer is that throughout her very long career, spanning over five decades, she kept her work almost uniformly fine—this despite the...