SOURCE: "Lamentations for the Woes of Life," in The New York Times, August 21, 1963, p. 31.

In the following review, Prescott finds the stories of The Reservoir tiringly depressing, while those of Snowman, Snowman he perceives to be generally unremarkable.

Collections of short stories proverbially sell badly. Publishers flinch and worry when novelists insist on publication of their short stories in book form. But what is a publisher to do if he admires the novelist and is betting on his future? Usually all he can do is print a small first edition and hope that the novelist's next book will be a popular smash. George Braziller, a courageous publisher who has often backed writers that he admires but the public doesn't has thought of a new approach to the problem of the novelist with a lot of short stories ready for publication. He has put them into two handsomely printed...