Everyone should read William Trevor's stories

The last 4 stories in William Trevor's posthumous and aptly titled Last Stories give you a sense of his final thoughts and ideas, and dark view of life he had indeed. Three of the 4 stories concern marital infidelity and desertion; two of the last 4, and maybe 3 depending on how you read the final story (The Women) concern people with serious mental illness, delusion, and obsession. Trevor's view of life has always been dark and at times glum, but in most of his earlier fiction that darkness was largely caused by society and forces generally beyond the control of the protagonists; in one that I consider his best story, about a man struggling to make a living in the doomed profession of church statuary (ultimately the only work he can find is on a road crew), Trevor ends w/ the famous observation that "the world failed, not him" (paraphrasing - and BTW many of WT's best stories end with authorial observation and commentary - quite an atypical structure, in which most stories today, following Joyce, end with an "apercu," an observation or perception by the protagonist). Of these final four stories, I think Making Conversation is probably the best: a man becomes obsessed w/ a woman whom he meets by change and stalks her (today, she would immediately call the police for a protective order), and his wife one day shows up at the woman's door expecting the worst. Giotto's Angels is a bit of any outlier here, w/ the protagonist being an expert in restoring church artworks (see above, an occasional WT theme and fitting well w/ his sense of beauty and loss) who suffers from amnesiac breakdowns and perhaps other ailments; he gets corralled by a prostitute who goes home w/ him and faces the dilemma of whether to rob this troubled innocent. Winter Idyll is another strong story and touches on many of WT's final themes: A married man with children abandons his wife to take up w/ a younger woman whom he'd tutored when he was a young man and she a child. Strangely, he doesn't pay much of a price for this decision; Trevor is not one to condemn his characters - rather, he presents them w/ sorrow and pity. I didn't much like the final story, The Women, when I read it in the NYer, and still and troubled by the ridiculous improbabilities of the plot, but on 2nd reading I have come to appreciate the openness and ambiguity of the ending: Is one of the women truly the mother of the boarding-school student whom she's been stalking, or is the woman, like others in this collection, suffering from delusions and mental illness? Trevor was a truly great writer, and everyone interested in the art of the short story should read his collected stories and then Last Stories as a sad coda.