Creatures of the Earth: New and Selected Stories

McGahern, John

ISBN 10: 0571237851 / ISBN 13: 9780571237852

Published by Faber & Faber, 2007

About this Item

Seller Inventory # U9780571237852

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Creatures of the Earth: New and Selected Stories
• Publisher: Faber & Faber
• Publication Date: 2007
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0571237851
• ISBN 13: 9780571237852
• Binding: Soft cover
• Edition: 1749630307.
• Condition: Very Good
• Dust Jacket Condition: 47031262
• Signed: 6/11/2025 8:25:07 AM
• Seller catalogs:
  • 1
  • U
  • 9780571237852

About this title

Synopsis

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.

About the Author

Born in 1934, John McGahern was the eldest of seven children, raised on a farm in the West of Ireland. The son of a Garda sergeant who had served as an IRA volunteer in the Irish War of Independence, he was devastated by his mother's death when he was nine. An outstanding student, McGahern studied at University College Dublin and became a teacher, but was dismissed when his controversial second novel, The Dark, was banned by the Irish Censorship Board. He moved to London to continue writing and met his future wife, Madeline Green, in 1967, with whom he remained until his death in 2006. The author of six acclaimed novels and four story collections, his novel Amongst Women, was shortlisted for the 1990 Booker Prize and made into a BBC TV series. McGahern held numerous academic posts internationally and was awarded honours including the Irish-American Foundation Award, an Irish PEN Award, the Prix Ecureuil de Littérature Etrangère and the Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. On his death in 2006, McGahern was celebrated by The Guardian as 'the most important Irish novelist since Samuel Beckett.'