Written in New York between 1982 and 1987, the short stories in Will She Understand? bring us up to date with Fielding Dawson’s work since the publication of Krazy Kat & 76 More, Collected Stories 1950-1976 and Virginia Dare, Stories 1976-1981. Reviewing Krazy Kat, the San Francisco Chronicle’s critic compared the work favorably with Hemingway, Cain and Chandler, and suggested that “Dawson makes his foreground study that underbelly of society which the hard-boiled school had described only as backdrop.”
In these thirty-two new stories, Dawson confirms and extends his mastery of a form he helped invent: the projectivist tale, in which a heightened sensitivity of attention registers in hair’s-breadth detail not just physical realities but emotional events occurring in transformational, dreamlike, intuitional dimensions way off the tone-scale of the English narrative sentence.