A Book Worth Knowing

If you have not read William Maxwell’s So Long, See You Tomorrow, set aside the hundred and thirty-five pages it will ask of you and give them gladly. It is the story of a murder on an Illinois farm in 1921 and of a boy who, fifty years later, is still trying to write down what he should have said to another boy at school.

What makes the novel a quiet masterpiece is Maxwell’s willingness to admit, on the page, the limits of his own knowing. He invents what he cannot remember; he says so plainly when he does. The book becomes a confession of how we tell the stories of people we have failed.

It is a small book. We have given copies to more friends than any other novel on the shelf. Each has come back grateful.

— The Editors