I Cannot Tell a Lie, Exactly: And Other Stories

When Mary Ladd Gavell died in 1967, at the age of forty-seven, she had never been published. But her story "The Rotifer" was fortuitously discovered by John Updike, who called it a "gem" and included it in The Best American Short Stories of the Century . With the publication of I Cannot Tell a Lie , Exactly, Mary Ladd Gavell takes her rightful place among the best writers of her—and our—time.