Boxes of Time: Stories

Stories about messy emotions, troubled families and damaged personalities. This 11th story collection contains 24 stories by Jack Matthews (1925-2013) making it the author's largest. Matthews picked BOXES OF TIME as the title for this collection because each story reveals the drama of worlds long since gone but whose dreams and fears and anxieties still resonate today.

Over his lifetime Jack Matthews wrote over 200 stories, many of which were published in literary journals. Although stories varied widely in subject and style, they often could be described as urbane, philosophical, poetic and sardonic.

Stories in BOXES OF TIME were mostly published between 1961 and 1981; they feature characters who are troubled or unsure of themselves trying to deal with life's usual disappointments. Stylistically, these stories are polished and carefully written, but they deal with messy emotions, troubled families and damaged personalities. The characters may not be as educated or self-assured as the people in his other collections, but they still manage to figure out interesting things about themselves and the people around them. Stories from this period focus especially on the emotional stresses that separate parents from their children.

"Matthews stories are like friends from small towns: They are honest, warm, occasionally lyrical and as strange and idiosyncratic as the rest of us." (Arthur Sabatini, PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER)

"Mr. Matthews is a master of prose conversation and deadpan charm. He is ironic, cool, and shrewd, and he writes a lucid prose." (Tom O'Brien, NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW)