A Vintage Shorts “Short Story Month” Selection From the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of the classic A Thousand Acres and winner of the 1985 O. Henry Award, “Lily”—first published as part of the classic collection of short stories, The Age of Grief—is the dazzling, tragic portrait of a beautiful and lonely young poet who meddles in her longtime friends’ marriage when they come to visit. Neither Kevin nor Nancy seemed at all interested in Lily’s life in the couple of years since they’ve last seen her. But she has suffered through hours of their squabbling, awkwardly endured complaints from each about the other, and when Kevin finally demands to know if his wife still loves him, Lily must decide whether she wants to end this frustrating intrusion into the calm of her life for good. An ebook short.
Author
Jane Smiley is a Pulitzer Prize-winning American novelist. Born in Los Angeles, California, Smiley grew up in Webster Groves, Missouri, a suburb of St. Louis, and graduated from John Burroughs School. She obtained a A.B. at Vassar College, then earned a M.F.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Iowa. While working towards her doctorate, she also spent a year studying in Iceland as a Fulbright Scholar. From 1981 to 1996, she taught at Iowa State University. Smiley published her first novel, Barn Blind, in 1980, and won a 1985 O. Henry Award for her short story "Lily", which was published in The Atlantic Monthly. Her best-selling A Thousand Acres, a story based on William Shakespeare's King Lear, received the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1992. It was adapted into a film of the same title in 1997. In 1995 she wrote her sole television script produced, for an episode of Homicide: Life on the Street. Her novella The Age of Grief was made into the 2002 film The Secret Lives of Dentists. Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel (2005), is a non-fiction meditation on the history and the nature of the novel, somewhat in the tradition of E. M. Forster's seminal Aspects of the Novel, that roams from eleventh century Japan's Murasaki Shikibu's The Tale of Genji to twenty-first century Americans chick lit. In 2001, Smiley was elected a member of The American Academy of Arts and Letters.
