Eudora Welty said that Katherine Anne Porter writes stories with a power that stamps them to their very last detail on the memory. Set in her native Texas and her beloved Mexico, prewar Nazi Germany and the gothic Old South, they are stories of love, outrage, betrayal, and spiritual reckoning that are severe but never cruel, and always exquisitely precise. They number fewer than thirty, but as Robert Penn Warren commented, many are unsurpassed in...