With his second collection of short stories, Richard Yates continues to extend his range as a writer of stunning power and eloquence. "Liars in Love" is concerned with troubled relations and the elusive nature of truth: Hope, dread, disorder, and a nervous entangling of separate lives in Greenwich Village during the Depression, as seen by a child, in `Oh, Joseph, I’m So Tired`. The volatile, perilous course of events set in motion when two divorced mothers agree to “pool their resources” and live together, with their children in `Trying Out for the Race`. A young American soldier’s too-abrupt postwar reunion, on foreign soil, with the lovely, dismayingly grown-up sister he hasn’t seen since he was eleven and she was ten, in `A Compassionate Leave`. The seven stories in this collection showcase Yates`s extraordinary gift for observation and description. The last and longest of them, a rich, lucid, and compelling piece called `Saying Goodbye to Sally`, achieves a fitting conclusion for the book – and a resonant final statement of its theme.