Victory Over Japan

Ellen Gilchrist, whose first collection of short stories. In the Land of Dreamy Dreams, won both prizes and international acclaim, now offers fourteen new stories that combine classic literary style and form with contemporary emotional appeal. Throughout these stories, one hears echoes of Flannery O'Connor and Eudora Welty, but Ms. Gilchrist has her own unique voice—and it is outrageously funny, moving, tragic, and always appealing.

In the opening, and title, story, "Victory Over Japan," Rhoda, a precocious and cunning third-grader, combines World War II —and its rather vague effects on her little sleepy Indiana town—with the awesome fact that one of her classmates has been bitten by a rabid squirrel ...and she does this to her own personal advantage. In "Jade Buddhas, ..." nineteen-year-old Nora Jane Wittington, who has recently robbed a bar in New Orleans, sets off to join her lover in California, where she tries, unsuccessfully, to rob a bookstore, and instead ends up taking its owner as her new lover.

In the final tale, "Traceleen, She's Still Talking," a black maid recounts how her mistress, Miss Crystal, finally wreaks revenge on her arrogant older brother.