Coming, Aphrodite

A Vintage Shorts "Short Story Month" Selection Don Hedger had lived for four years on the top floor of an old house on the south side of Washington Square, New York, and nobody had ever disturbed him. But early one May, the vivacious singer Eden Brower moves in. "Coming, Aphrodite!" is a Willa Cather masterpiece, possessing all the qualities that bubble just beneath the surface of Cather's work, deceptively tranquil on top but as exciting, ambitious, and boisterous as the American continent she so well represented below. Including Coney Island ballooning scenes, ancient Aztec tales, melancholy artists and prairie girls navigating the big city, Cather weaves an astonishing narrative of lost love and dashed opportunities. From the Collected Stories, spanning the length of her triumphant career. An eBook short.

Willa Cather was born near Winchester, Virginia, in 1873. When she was ten years old, her family moved to the prairies of Nebraska, later the setting for a number of her novels. At the age of twenty-one, she graduated from the University of Nebraska and spent the next few years doing newspaper work and teaching high school in Pittsburgh. In 1903 her first book, April Twilights, a collection of poems, was published, and two years later The Troll Garden, a collection of stories, appeared in print. After the publication of her first novel, Alexander's Bridge, in 1912, Cather devoted herself fulltime to writing, and, over the years, completed eleven more novels (including O Pioneers!, My Ántonia, The Professor's House, and Death Comes for the Archbishop), four collections of short stories, and two volumes of essays. Cather won the Pulitzer Prize for One of Ours in 1923. She died in 1947.