An Academy Award-nominated screenwriter, Tess Slesinger was one of the most innovative and original short story writers of her generation and Time: The Present collects the best of her short stories together in order to confirm her as one of the finest American writers of the 1930s.
 
Her work deals with issues of sexuality, economics, race, and the complexities of human relationships in ways that remain highly relevant today. They are by turns satirical, comic, bittersweet, and tragic -- but, perhaps most of all, always relatable, entertaining, well-turned and resonant.
 
As Vivian Gornick puts it in her eloquent introduction, Slesinger's 'feeling for life's unavoidable sorrow remains haunting' and this, together with her great stylistic risks, frees her stories of constraints of period and place; they are works that are timeless in their impact and approach.
 
The collection includes numerous stories from The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, and other magazines, collected here for the first time, and aims to help in restoring Slesinger's rightful place as one of the greats of the 20th century short story form.
 
'As witty and exhilarating a storyteller as one can find anywhere' - The New York Times 
 
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Tess Slesinger was born in New York City in 1905. She attended Swarthmore and Columbia University. Her novel The Unpossessed was published in 1934 and a collection of her stories appeared the following year. Soon after its publication, she moved to Hollywood, where she became a successful screenwriter, earning an Oscar nomination for A Tree Grows In Brooklyn which she co-wrote with her husband, Frank Davis. She died of cancer in 1945.