Creatures of the Earth: New and Selected Stories

✍ Scribed by McGahern, John

• Book ID: 108053899
• Publisher: Faber And Faber
• Year: 2007
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 237 KB
• Category: Fiction
• ISBN-13: 9780571237852

✦ 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