Frank O'Connor is regarded as one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century, and a master of the short story form. In this definitive compilation of his stories, including "Guests of the Nation," O'Connor explores universal themes of love, loss, and faith through the particulars of the Irish experience, both in Ireland and abroad.
"One of the masters of the short story." - Peter Prescott, Newsweek
"In his 63 years, Frank O'Connor produced an impressive amount of work.. but its his short stories that guarantee his immortality. They are encapsulated universes. While most modern stories focus on a single moment, Frank O'Connor's generally sum up the patterns of whole lives....Each (story] is, in its own way, shattering." - Anne Tyler, Chicago Sun-Times
"Walter Benjamin says in his essay on Leskov that people think of a storyteller as someone who has come from afar. O'Connor's best stories put the same thought into our heads; how far, in some imaginative sense, he has to travel to achieve such wisdom and to accomplish it with such flair"-DENIS DONOGHUE, New York Times Book Review
"In almost all the stories in this excellently balanced collection O'Con-nor's people explode from the page. The nice are here and the nasty: the gentle, the generous, the mean, the absurd, those rich in dignity, those without a shred of it...Without adornment, he simply tells the truth." - WILLIAM TREVOR, Washington Post Book World
"The life work of an artist whose stature is comparable to that of W.B.Yeats and James Joyce, an artist who, in the words of Yeats himself, did for Ireland what Chekhov did for Russia." - Robert Leiter, Philadelphia Inquirer
"The 67 stories in this collection... complete a full sketchbook of superb observations and rich human situations. Though the subjects are mostly Irish and the landscape is either Cork or Dublin, the themes are as universal as those of Chekhov." - Ben Pleasants, Los Angeles Times
