William Trevor, Cheating at Canasta: Stories

Cheating at Canasta is a marvelous, enviable title, and William Trevor is an astonishing, and astonishingly reliable, writer. Along with Alice Munro, he is also one of the living masters of the short story. That sort of thing usually sounds like so much hogwash, but in this instance it’s nothing but the plain truth. Even as he approaches eighty, Trevor continues to produce carefully crafted marvels that often whipsaw between deviance and devotion, or dereliction and disappointment, from one story to the next. His best tales are compact and powerful moral symphonies, and are so full of startling and often catastrophic disruptions and moments of exhausted grace that they seem as utterly believable as life.