"The Collected Prose appears in the same spruce format as The Complete Poems, and it doubles what we possess of Bishop's writing. Robert Giroux [her longtime editor and friend] has arranged the book according to a sketch found among Bishop's papers after her death; he has reconstructed from nearly complete fragments her pungent memoir of her mentor, Marianne Moore; and in his affectionate introduction, he has brought to life the circumstances under which these pieces were written. . . . It is no exaggeration to say that these stories will be read beside her poems, as Keat's letters are beside his. . . . 'The Sea & Its Shore' and 'In Prison' [are] worthy of Kafka or Poe."--David Kalstone, The New York Times Book Review
"A stunning collection. . . . These are the kind of stories you should linger over, savor, and rediscover again and again."--Elin Schoen, Mademoiselle
"A record of merciless observation, full of surprises both tragic and comic. . . . Again and again, in these pages, it is the precision that astonishes. . . . So often what Bishop gives us are these small, exact glimpses of the mundane, shorn of all rhetorical indulgence. But when looking is thus transformed, will any word but 'vision' do?"--April Bernard, Newsday
