Raw, lyrical and blazing with intensity, these short stories are a potent distillation of the genius of Ralph Ellison, author of Invisible Man.’He saw the dark bird glide into the sun and glow like a bird of flaming gold’Ranging from the Jim Crow South to a Harlem bingo parlour, from the hobo jungles of the Great Depression to Wales during the Second World War, they all display the musically layered voices, soaring language and sheer ebullience that made Ellison a giant of twentieth-century American writing. Written early in Ellison’s career, several of these fourteen stories were unpublished in his lifetime, including ‘A Storm of Blizzard Proportions’ which features in this collection for the first time. ‘Approach the simple elegance of Chekhov’ Washington Post