The Silence Room: Short Stories

by Sean O'Brien

Chain-smoking alcoholics, warring academics, gothic stalkers, and aspiring writers are just some of the visitors that browse the mysterious library at the heart of this sinister novel. Idlers and idolizers alike can be referenced, in body or in text, among the crepuscular alcoves and dim staircases of this seemingly unassuming building. The secret to a family curse, a dog-eared first edition of Wallace Stevens’ Harmonium , the gruesome fate of a feminist literary theorist—all are available to simply take down from the shelf. Moving between genres, ranging from gothic horror to English pastoral, from critical theory to Cold War noir, this riveting and voracious story-within-stories crescendos the turbulent voices of culture to an effect equally maddening and exalting.

Genres: Short Stories

202 pages, Paperback

First published November 27, 2008

About the author

Sean O'Brien is a British poet, critic and playwright. Prizes he has won include the Eric Gregory Award (1979), the Somerset Maugham Award (1984), the Cholmondeley Award (1988), the Forward Poetry Prize (1995, 2001 and 2007) and the T. S. Eliot Prize (2007). He is one of only four poets (the others being Ted Hughes, John Burnside and Jason Allen-Paisant) to have won both the T. S. Eliot Prize and the Forward Poetry Prize for the same collection of poems (The Drowned Book).
Born in London, England, O'Brien grew up in Hull, and was educated at Hymers College and Selwyn College, Cambridge. He has lived since 1990 in Newcastle upon Tyne, where he teaches at the university. He was the Weidenfeld Visiting Professor at St. Anne's College, Oxford, for 2016–17.