The Collected Short Stories (Abacus Books) - Softcover

Dickens, Charles (1812-1870)

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0349113335 ISBN 13: 9780349113333

Publisher: New York, Hurst And Co. , Publishers, 1889

Synopsis

The Irish writer Clare Boylan has been publishing compelling and captivating work for over twenty years. Though she is the author of six critically acclaimed novels, she remains one of the most original and exciting short-story writers of our time. Like Alistair MacLeod, Alice Munro, and her compatriot William Trevor, her stories are universal. Hers is an imagination that is able, magically and marvelously, to transform everyday experience into something quite unexpected.

As perceptive as Colette, as darkly witty as Dorothy Parker, she waves a flag for the dispossessed and the marginalized and gleefully pulls love from behind its romantic facade. She makes the reader laugh out loud while at the same time compelling an uncomfortable self-examination. Plumbing the inner workings of marriage, aging, family dynamics, and the cost of love, her richly sardonic humor and acutely merciless observations may seem gentle, but look again, for they are edged with razors.

Celebrating twenty years of rare accomplishment, The Collected Stories introduces American readers to a luminous and unforgettable writer of short fiction.

About this title

Review

The Irish short story writer Clare Boylan occupies much the same fictional territory as Fay Weldon: the place where ordinary occurrences like love affairs and motherhood and death take on the coloring of the extraordinary. The stories featured in Collected Stories range from 1978 to 2000, and the early ones are notable mostly for their sense of unease: "Housekeeper's Cut" is the tale of a cheating wife who's really just looking for a break from her role as wife and mom. Her expectations and her lover's misreading of them are treated with painful, unnerving clarity. Boylan's later stories are something else again: they strike an exacting balance between acerbic wit and tender compassion. Consider this passage from "Affairs in Order," about a philandering rogue: "He was a poet, and with the hair for it. In the plain stretches of life, women particularly remembered the buttery feel of his heavy gold hair." There's so much going on here: the gentle mockery of "with the hair for it," the sweetness of "the plain stretches of life," the understanding that a man can be loved, finally, for his hair. Boylan is also very good on madness: her crazy people have clear objectives (for instance, stealing a baby) and exquisite rationales. By the end of this superb, funny, delicate collection, you're hard-pressed to tell who is mad and who is sane, and it's a deliciously unmoored feeling. --Claire Dederer

About the Author

Clare Boylan is the author of three volumes of short stories and six novels, the most recent being Beloved Stranger. She lives in Ireland.

Edition details

• Publisher: New York, Hurst And Co. , Publishers
• Publication date: 1889
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0349113335
• ISBN 13: 9780349113333
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 384