From Publishers Weekly
These three interconnected stories are the Pulitzer Prize-winning author's first fiction in more than a decade. Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
In each of these three stories, which orignally appeared in Esquire magazine in the Seventies and Eighties, narrator Paul Whitehurst recalls significant episodes from his childhood in Virginia during the Depression and the Second World War. In "Love Day," Paul remembers his father's analysis of the economic benefits the war has brought to the South, as he himself sails to Japan with the invasion fleet. In "Shadrach," a dying former slave returns to the rundown plantation where he was born. In the title story, Paul commemorates his mother's agonizing death from cancer. The narratives, as Styron says in a preface, "reflect the experiences of the author," as well as recapitulate, in luminous prose, most of the major themes of his longer fiction, from Set This House on Fire (1951) to Sophie's Choice (1981). For all its brevity, this collection is arguably the best single-volume introduction to this important author. Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 5/15/93.- Edward B. St. John, Loyola Law Sch. Lib., Los AngelesCopyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Kirkus Reviews
A short little trip into a half-comfortable kind of writerly nostalgia in three stories (declares an Author's Note) that ``reflect the experiences of the author at the ages of twenty, ten, and thirteen.'' Bending his hand again to scenes of WW II, Styron visits (``Love Day'') a Marine Division in the Pacific, offering in brief form a standard cast of characters from Many-a-Movie: the tough but just-a-guy commander; the platoon leader who wants to be a writer; the narrator who has secret home-thoughts and, through them, learns something about meaning and fear. Throughout, the rickety narrative is made forgivable--barely--by the pleasures of the period detail. ``Shadrach,'' set in 1935, is more complex--and perhaps overall less convincing, though even more painstaking in its (in this case) recalling of rural Depression-era details. In it, a middle-class boy admits to his envy of the slovenly but life-rich existence of a family of fallen white trash (the Dabneys), to whom a 99-year-old ex-slave returns to die. Finally, set in 1938, amid rumblings of approaching war, ``A Tidewater Morning'' shows a boy rebelling against one kind of tyranny (his mean and niggardly paper-route boss) while his mother (once a classical singer) dies horribly of the inescapable tyranny of cancer and his father crumbles gradually through weakness and pity. Styronic plusses and minuses: the displeasures of the overly- written-about and revisited, and of the rickety narrative shortcut (``This is a farce! We didn't come out here these thousands of miles to sit around that stinking little island and watch our hands and feet rot off. We were trained to kill Japs, for Christ's sake!''); and, meanwhile, the pleasures of atmosphere, detail, and the now-and-again indisputably lovely phrase. -- Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Book Description
In this brilliant collection of "long short stories, " the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Sophie's Choice returns to the coastal Virginia setting of his first novels. Through the eyes of a man recollecting three episodes from his youth, William Styron explores with new eloquence death, loss, war, and racism.

From the Inside Flap
In this brilliant collection of "long short stories, " the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Sophie's Choice returns to the coastal Virginia setting of his first novels. Through the eyes of a man recollecting three episodes from his youth, William Styron explores with new eloquence death, loss, war, and racism.

ANNOTATION

In this brilliant collection of "long short stories, " the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Sophie's Choice returns to the coastal Virginia setting of his first novels. Through the eyes of a man recollecting three episodes from his youth, William Styron explores with new eloquence death, loss, war, and racism.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

In these stories - never before published in book form - William Styron focuses his unmatched talents on matters that have preoccupied him during much of his adult writing career. Although their immediate subjects are different - a young Marine about to invade Japan in World War II remembers the role his father played in building one of the ships; a child recalls what happened when a former slave came home to die in the place where he was born; a boy describes the hot summer day on which his mother died, changing his life forever - the stories are told in the voice of the same narrator, who remembers vividly his youth in a tidewater town in Virginia. A Tidewater Morning is written with the power and distinction of a writer who occupies a preeminent place in modern American literature.

FROM THE CRITICS

Publishers Weekly

The publisher bills this as Styron's first book of fiction in more than a decade. Sophie's Choice was published in 1979--but that is misleading: the most recent of these three Esquire stories collected here was published in 1987, and the other two appeared in 1978 and 1985. As one would expect, there are patches of startling writing here, particularly in the title story, in which Styron's evocation of the Virginia landscape of his youth is achingly beautiful. But on the evidence of these unremarkable pieces, Styron does not seem to be a natural short-story writer; his lush prose needs the breathing room of a long novel, space enough for his narrative to gather momentum before lifting off. The three tales are united by their single narrator, one Paul Whitehurst, and his search for ``light refracted within a flashing moment of remembered childhood.'' They take up the issues Styron has grappled with in previous fiction--the legacy of slavery and racism in the South, the constricting ties of family relationships, the tragedy of war--but with neither a refreshing new perspective nor the tremendous oratorical potency that Styron's readers expect from him. This is well-crafted magazine fiction that is satisfying only for as long as it lasts. (Sept.)

Library Journal