Tales From The Sweet Side

The banged-up hardcover perched invitingly on the stage of "John Lithgow: Stories by Heart" is a prop, but one with a history. Called "Tellers of Tales," it's a much-perused anthology of short stories published in 1939. No less than W. Somerset Maugham edited its 100 stories, which ranged from Edgar Allan Poe to Balzac to Dorothy Parker to Faulkner, and it was "kind of a Lithgow family bible" to the itinerant, close-knit, unapologetically Anglophile family that included an impressionable boy...