So Long, See You Tomorrow »

In this magically evocative novel, William Maxwell explores the enigmatic gravity of the past, which compels us to keep explaining it even as it makes liars out of us every time we try. On a winter morning in the 1920s, a shot rings out on a farm in rural Illinois. A man named Lloyd Wilson has been killed. And the tenuous friendship between two lonely teenagers—one privileged yet neglected, the other a troubled farm boy—has been shattered.

Fifty years later, one of those boys—now a grown man—tries to reconstruct the events that led up to the murder. In doing so, he is inevitably drawn back to his lost friend Cletus, who has the misfortune of being the son of Wilson's killer and who in the months before witnessed things that Maxwell's narrator can only guess at. Out of memory and imagination, the surmises of children and the destructive passions of their parents, Maxwell creates a luminous American classic of youth and loss.

Library Journal

This superb series of interviews and readings has expanded to include longer selections from its authors, in this case a short, autobiographical novel that won Maxwell the American Book Award in 1980. Set in Lincoln, Illinois, which Maxwell calls "my imagination's home," the story is modeled after incidents in Maxwell's youth: his mother's death when he was ten; his father's remarriage and their move to a new house; and Maxwell's relationship to a killer's son. Maxwell's narration, like his prose, is devoid of all theatrical effect: it is a quietly told story by a thoughtful man with something on his mind and in his heart. He is nevertheless traversing fairly familiar fictional ground. What is extraordinary about this program is his talk with Kay Bonetti, in which Maxwell, 87 at the time of this recording, discusses his life and work with a reflective honesty that is unmatched by any other author in the series. Maxwell's career also encompasses four decades as fiction editor of The New Yorker, and questions about the authors with whom he worked, such as John Cheever and J.D. Salinger, are met with the same directness and lucidity that characterize his prose. Recommended.Peter Josyph, New York