"[McGahern] may well be Ireland's finest living fiction writer.... [His] stories are well-wrought acts of the imagination that fill the heady space between prayer and song." - Boston Globe
These thirty-four funny, tragic, tender and acerbic stories represent the complete short fiction of the finest Irish writer since Joyce and Beckett.
With fierce honesty, plainspoken lyricism, and an unerring feel for the knotty texture of everyday life, John McGahern circumnavigates a world that seems to have stopped on Easter 1916- a world in which sons strive to gain the blessings of unyielding fathers and youngsters grapple with the mysteries of sex while grown men and women are reduced to children as they try and fail to possess- or even understand -one another.
The Collected Stories of John McGahern are as beautiful as the Irish landscape and as heartbreaking as Ireland's history.
"A master of the clean, plain, powerful description... brilliant." - The New York Times Book Review
"There is more resonance in McGahern's prose, more richness of character and setting, than will be found in a shelf of what passes for 'smart writing nowadays... He allows us to eavesdrop on the muted words and ambiguous gestures that amount to a secret code of the human soul." - Los Angeles Times
"McGahern's stories might be to contemporary Irish culture what Raymond Carver's are to ours." - Washington Post Book World
