"Succeeds at conveying the writer's youthful rawness . . . These stories capture a moment when Capote was hungry to capture the rural South, the big city, and the subtle emotions that so many around him were determined to keep unspoken." --USA Today
"A window on the young writer's emerging voice and creativity . . . Capote's ability to conjure a time, place and mood with just a few sentences is remarkable." --Associated Press
"Blueprints of the august, confident, and delightfully acerbic writer-to-come." --The Los Angeles Review of Books
"Dazzling." --The Columbus Dispatch
"[These stories] stand in their own right as lovely vignettes of the lives of the lonely, broken and troubled. . . . Breathtaking in their precocity, craftsmanship, simplicity and the tenderness [Capote] became renowned for." --The Independent (U.K.)
"These ten-plus stories were written when Capote was a teenager and young man and will shed light on his subsequent work while remaining sharply observed pleasures in their own right." --Library Journal
"[A] gathering of the great American prose stylist's earliest pieces, published for the first time . . . Students of both Capote and the short story will find this instructive and entertaining." --Kirkus Reviews