SOURCE: “Shirley Ann Grau and the Short Story,” in Southern Quarterly, Vol. 21, No. 4, Summer, 1983, pp. 83-101.

In the following essay, Rohrberger provides a detailed assessment of Grau's skills as a short story writer and identifies thematic threads in the writer's work.

The problem with Shirley Ann Grau is that she has consistently refused to stand still and conform to the stereotypes critics and reviewers have created for her. The problem of course, is not hers but ours, for we have consistently failed to understand the complexity of her statements and the excellence of her forms. Rather than try here to treat the corpus of her fiction, I have decided to examine the short stories, starting with the earliest and coming to ones she is currently working on for collection in a new anthology. My hope is to demonstrate not only her extraordinary skill in the short story genre...