The late fiction writer Richard Yates had a gift for establishing a character's place in the world with a single, bold sentence, as in his short story "A Natural Girl," where a crying man is summed up with the passage, "He was one of the five or six most respected hematologists in the United States, and nothing like this had happened to him for a great many years." That same story features one of Yates' bleakest, most revelatory lines, when the crying man's daughter explains why she no longer loves him. "There's no more why to not loving than there is to loving," she says. "I think most intelligent people understand that." The Collected Stories Of Richard Yates brings together the author's two out-of-print short-story collections, 1962's Eleven Kinds Of Loneliness and 1981's Liars In Love, along with nine previously uncollected stories. The volume is under-annotated, with no indication of when each story was written, or when and where each was first published. This matters chiefly because so many of Yates's stories involve people looking back at the recent past, and it would help to know just how far back they're looking. Regardless, the sheer quantity of meaning-laden slice-of-life stories outweighs the lack of scholarship accompanying them. Besides, just about every story follows the same semi-autobiographical chronology: His characters are typically children of divorce who grow up in Greenwich Village during the Depression, serve in Germany at the end of WWII, return to America, marry too young, contract tuberculosis, take a succession of hack writing jobs with ad agencies and news services, get a grant to study overseas, and see their marriages disintegrate under the pressure of their own cynicism and presumption. In conversational prose, the author evaluates each piece of this timeline and examines seemingly indescribable human emotional states. Yates' characters share a common history and a common attitude, a smug certainty that other people are making fools of themselves. In story after story, protagonists redirect their self-delusion and self-hatred into distaste for their acquaintances' behavior. Personalities dissolve into the crowd, certain that their best days are behind them. Yates was clearly using these fictions to take responsibility for his own life, and though masterpieces like "Fun With A Stranger," "Builders," and "A Compassionate Leave" are profoundly sad, they also provide the deep satisfaction of the best literature. When Yates captures a moment with phrases as evocative as "(crying) can be a pleasure beyond all reckoning if your head is pressed in your mother's waist," his accuracy brings the joy of recognition, even as it breaks hearts.