I haven't read any of R. V. Cassill's novels, but as a storywriter he seems to me to hit it pretty consistently. He writes very tightly [in The Father and Other Stories], without any [vague free-wheeling prose] …, and with a high specificity of accurate placing detail. It's a pleasure to see language used with such precision, even though the stories carry with them a certain air of the creative-writing class; even if they weren't produced in one…. The genesis of most of his stories lies either in the memories of a middle-western childhood, or in the daily, or at least possible, experiences of a teacher or writer-on-campus. In the latter vein, one of Mr. Cassill's most impressive achievements is "And in My Heart," which describes the relationship between a middle-aged poet and professor, whose creative reputation is well in the past, and a "difficult" interesting student, who has a sizeable element of the charlatan about him. To say that it reminds me at times of Lionel Trilling's "Of this Time, of that Place" isn't to undermine the excellence of Mr. Cassill's work, merely to indicate its genre. Beneath the urbane, rather sad surface of his writing there is a good deal of controlled pain, which occasionally manifests itself in shocking forms. This is particularly true in the brilliant and terrible title-story, "The Father," which is about a worthy but stupid farmer whose small son is involved in an accident with a piece of farm-machinery; the man saves the boy's life by cutting off his hand, but thereafter is consumed with an intense and wholly irrational sense of guilt which finally destroys his reason, with a ghastly result. Such a summary will probably give a false idea of the reality of the story, which presents its horrors only by indirection, and touches the fringes of genuine tragedy without exhibiting the sensationalism which, these days, is such a temptation to a writer who ventures into extreme areas of experience.