Short Stories by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings

Admirers of Rawlings's Pulitzer Prize-winning The Yearling and her other novels should welcome this first collection of all but two of her short works, most originally published in the New Yorker , the Saturday Evening Post and Scribner's Magazine between 1928 and 1953. The stories, some only a couple of pages long, are presented in order of publication and come together piece by piece like the blocks of a simple homespun guilt. From the early ``Jacob's Ladder'' to ``A Mother in Mannville'' and ``Fish Fry and Fireworks,'' Rawlings sharpened her storytelling skills and deepened her understanding of the backwoods world of her Florida neighbors and the African Americans who worked for them. She had a knack for setting each scene with a few homey details, putting the reader right inside the story. Dialect, colorful but always intelligible, was used to great effect. In ``Cracker Chidlings'' Fatty Blake critiques his neighbor's Brunswick Stew: `` `I was born and raised in Floridy and I'm pertickler. I don't want no squirrel eyes lookin' at me out o' my rations!' '' Tarr's introduction provides essential background to set these stories in the context of the time and Rawlings's efforts to face her own feelings about race. ``Black Secret,'' her last work on the subject, won an O. Henry Prize, as did ``Gal Young Un.'' Illustrations. (Apr.)