The Anchor Book of New Irish Writing - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0385498896 ISBN 13: 9780385498890

Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2000

Synopsis

An Anchor Paperback Original

An intelligent, sophisticated cross-section of Irish short fiction, ideal for casual readers and classrooms alike, that showcases where Irish writers are now, as well as where they are headed.

The contemporary Irish short story, perhaps even more than the novel, provides vital critical clues and guideposts for anyone interested in twentieth-century Irish writing--the Irish, after all, have always been a nation of storytellers, and the current practioners of this ancient tradition are in the process of exploding and rediefining the form.

The Anchor Book of New Irish Writing features a group of writers whose influence is already strongly felt in Irish literature, and who deserve to be better known in American, among them Aidan Matthews and Anne Enright.  The stories themselves are beautifully written, well-chosen by the editors, and presented in such a way as to guide readers through the fascinating dramatic, structural, and technical themes explored by contemporary Irish stories.  The result is a rich sampling of these writers including the work of more familiar ones-from Elizabetth Bowen to Neil Jordan-a collection that promises to introduce the new classics of Irish literature to a wider audience.

List of contributors:
Elizabeth Bowen
John Banville
Desmond Hogan
Bernard McLaverty
Cherry Smyth
Clare Boylan
Rita Kelly
Maeve Binchy
Anne Devlin
Evelyn Conlon
Emma Donoghue
Aiden Matthews
Anne Enright
Patrick McCabe
Rohan Sheenan
Michael O'Loughlin
Eamonn Sweeney
Marcy Dorcey
Ellis Ní Dhuibhne
Joseph O'Connor
Colum McCann
Neil Jordan

About this title

About the Author:

John Somer is a professor of English at Emporia State University in Emporia, Kansas, and has long been a student of Yeats and Joyce. John Daly is both an Associate Lecturer at Great Britain's Open University and managing editor at C. J. Fallon publishers in Ireland.

From Publishers Weekly:

Eschewing the usual norm for anthologies, which generally go for a canonical summation of a literature or a genre, Somer, a professor in Kansas, and Ireland-based editor Daly freeze-frame the changing literary scene in Ireland in this collection of 23 stories and a novella. Somer and Daly have also loosely but cleverly structured this volume to reflect the different directions being taken by Irish writers young and old. Boldly, they begin with "Summer Night" by Elizabeth Bowen, who died in 1973, a finely polished tale about marital troubles and familial deceit in which Bowen asks for "new forms of thinking and feeling." It is an ideal way to start a book that displays the efforts of later Irish writers to find these new forms. The endeavors range from the early stirring magicalism of John Banville, through the closely observed domesticities of Maeve Binchy, to sundry unsuccessful efforts by the likes of lesser-knowns (Evelyn Conlon, Emma Donahue) in a section titled "Telling" (although Patrick McCable's "The Hands of Dingo Deery" succeeds mightily). Another section, "Persona," introduces some forms of which Bowen might have approved--Eamonn Sweeney's circular tale, "Lord McDonald," and ?ilis Ni Dhuibhne's Carveresque "The Garden of Eden." Colum McCann stakes out his own section named after his famous story, "Fishing the Sloe-Black River," in which his gift for deep imagery is in full force. "Cathal's Lake" tells of a man who keeps count of the lives lost to the sectarian struggles by diligently unearthing swans inexplicably entombed in the sand around his lake and setting the bird free to emblematic life upon the lake's surface at news of each death. The last entry is writer/filmmaker Neil Jordan's novella "The Dream of a Beast," which impressionistically renders subliminal images denuded of any rational or realistic context. Like Joyce's Ulysses, which 80 years ago offered myriad stylistic directions in which a literature might travel, this collection maps where many of the travelers are at this very moment. (Mar.)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 0385498896
• ISBN 13: 9780385498890
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 384
• Editor: Somer John, Daly John