SOURCE: "A Lifetime of Tales from the Land of Broken Hearts," in New York Times Book Review, February 28, 1993, pp. 1, 25-7.

In the following review of The Collected Stories, Price argues that Trevor's short story writing is consistently strong but that his novels are better.

The voices of extraordinary writers like William Trevor are almost as quickly recognizable as those of great singers. Any lover of song will know a Pavarotti, a Leontyne Price, in an opening phrase—often in a single note. The genuinely sizable writers of fiction announce their presence almost as early. Some, like Conrad or Hemingway, speak in timbres distinctive enough to declare their markers in a single sentence. More often the novelist or short-story writer quietly names himself or herself, not by actual words or syntax but by an almost immediate revelation of what might be called his primal scene.

Even the voices of...