CHRISTMAS EVE 13 STORIES

Maeve Brennan

ISBN 10: 0684136430 / ISBN 13: 9780684136431

Published by Scribner, New York, 1974

About this Item

Very Good+ in a Very Good price clipped dust jacket. Shelf wear to panels. Creasing to upper and lower edges of front and rear panels. ; 9 X 5.90 X 1.10 inches; 244 pages.

Seller Inventory # 111040

Bibliographic Details

• Title: CHRISTMAS EVE 13 STORIES
• Publisher: Scribner, New York
• Publication Date: 1974
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0684136430
• ISBN 13: 9780684136431
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition: First Edition; First Printing.
• Seller catalogs:
  • Literature and Fiction
  • Religion and Spirituality
  • Christmas Books
  • Other

About this title

Synopsis

The short stories of Maeve Brennan are among the finest of our time. Her first collection In and Out of Never-Never Land, appeared several years ago, but by then her reputation had already been established by her many stories published in The New Yorker.

Christmas Eve opens with a groups of stories about Herbert's Retreat, a snug community on the Hudson River, not far from New York. Here Miss Brennan deals particularly with a man named Charles Runyon, whose self-satisfaction is as large as his malice. There follows a short, beautiful evocation of New York City on a snowy night. The last six stories in the collection are set in Ireland and they concern two very different families-- the Bagots and the Derdons. Miss Brennan writes about the cohesive strength of ordinary things in family life, about the sad triumph of a last survivor, about the loneliness of a marriage where nothing more can be said.

Maeve Brennan's stories make their remarkable achievements in a deceptively calm voice. But they do so with a flash of wit, a magically right detail, and a sudden, illuminating lift of eloquence. Christmas Eve gives the pleasure of reading an accomplished artist in fiction.