Between the Dark and the Daylight: Seven Psychological and Moral Tales from the Dean of American Letters (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9781627555562)

Between the Dark and the Daylight gathers seven late stories by William Dean Howells, moving through memory, conscience, strange perception, moral pressure, and the shadowed territory between realism and romance. Originally published in 1907 as Between the Dark and the Daylight: Romances, the collection includes "A Sleep and a Forgetting," "The Eidolons of Brooks Alford," "A Memory That Worked Overtime," "A Case of Metaphantasmia," "Editha," "Braybridge's Offer," and "The Chick of the Easter Egg."

This is Howells in a less familiar but highly useful form: not merely the great advocate of American realism, but a writer testing the borders of the seen and unseen, the ordinary and the uncanny, the moral and the psychological. The famous anti-war story "Editha" gives the collection lasting classroom value, while the more unusual tales of memory, identity, apparition, and mental disturbance broaden its appeal for readers of classic American fiction, psychological short stories, literary realism, and early twentieth-century tales of inward unease. For the SMK line, this is best positioned as a compact, discoverable Howells collection with both literary and darker story appeal.