Old Swords and Other Stories

by Desmond Hogan (Author)

• New

  Hardcover
  2009

  $16.80

  These ten stories by Desmond Hogan, his first publication since Larks' Eggs, New and Selected Stories (2005), collect newly minted shards of experience focused in the lives of the dreamers and the marginalized who populate his imagined worlds. They range in time and place from France and Italy in the nineteenth century to Ireland of the mid-twentieth century. Their concerns are fragility and identity expressed through the outer semblances of dress and deportment, and inner realities of fragmented memory and the retrieval of shared pasts. Close observation of nature combines with psychological unveilings, much of it in the form of erotic reverie. 'Belle', Iowa', 'Red Tide', 'Little Friends', 'Shelter', 'Sweet Marjoram', 'The Hare's Purse', 'The House of Mourning', 'Essex Slipper', 'Old Swords'; two of the stories have been selected for extract in both The Stinging Fly and Cyphers .This unique and occasional voice is unique to Irish letters, as each new gathering enlarges upon his reputation as one of Ireland's most fearless and innovative writers, who in the words of film-maker Neil Jordan, 'remakes the world every time he puts pen to paper'.