Collected Short Stories

by JohnMcGahern (Author)

• Used

  Paperback
  1998

  $5.79

  This remarkable volume brings together all of John McGahern's short fiction, fully revised, in a definitive text. Mc Gahern has long been recognized as a contemporary master of the short story; The Collected Stories confirms his reputation as Ireland's leading prose writer.

• Used

  Hardcover
  1992

  $24.67

• New

  Paperback
  2007

  $12.99

  McGahern's command of the short story places him among the finest practitioners of the form, in a lineage that runs from Chekhov through Joyce and the Anglo-American masters. When the collection was first published in 1992, the Sunday Times said 'there is a vivid pleasure to be had in the reading of these stories,' while for Cressida Connolly in the Evening Standard 'these wonderful stories are sad and true...McGahern is undoubtedly a great short story writer.' Many of the stories here are already classics: Gold Watch , High Ground and Parachutes , among others. McGahern's spare, restrained yet powerfully lyrical language draws meaning from the most ordinary situations, and turns apparently undramatic encounters into profoundly haunting events: a man visits his embittered father with his new wife; an ageing priest remembers a funeral he had attended years before; a boy steals comics from a shop to escape the rain-bound melancholy of a seaside holiday; an ageing teacher, who has escaped a religious order, wastes his life in a rural backwater that he knows he will never leave.