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Collected Stories
Celebrating twenty years of rare accomplishment, The Collected Stories introduces American readers to a luminous and unforgettable writer of short fiction.
The Irish writer Clare Boylan has been publishing compelling and captivating work for over twenty years. Though she is the author of six critically acclaimed novels, she remains one of the most original and exciting short-story writers of our time. Like Alistair MacLeod, Alice Munro, and her compatriot William Trevor, her stories are universal. Hers is an imagination that is able, magically and marvelously, to transform everyday experience into something quite unexpected.
As perceptive as Colette, as darkly witty as Dorothy Parker, she waves a flag for the dispossessed and the marginalized and gleefully pulls love from behind its romantic facade. She makes the reader laugh out loud while at the same time compelling an uncomfortable self-examination. Plumbing the inner workings of marriage, aging, family dynamics, and the cost of love, her richly sardonic humor and acutely merciless observations may seem gentle, but look again, for they are edged with razors.
The Irish writer Clare Boylan has been publishing compelling and captivating work for over twenty years. Though she is the author of six critically acclaimed novels, she remains one of the most original and exciting short-story writers of our time. Like Alistair MacLeod, Alice Munro, and her compatriot William Trevor, her stories are universal. Hers is an imagination that is able, magically and marvelously, to transform everyday experience into something quite unexpected.
As perceptive as Colette, as darkly witty as Dorothy Parker, she waves a flag for the dispossessed and the marginalized and gleefully pulls love from behind its romantic facade. She makes the reader laugh out loud while at the same time compelling an uncomfortable self-examination. Plumbing the inner workings of marriage, aging, family dynamics, and the cost of love, her richly sardonic humor and acutely merciless observations may seem gentle, but look again, for they are edged with razors.
- GenresShort StoriesFiction
412 pages, Paperback
Published September 26, 2002
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
January 20, 2018
I don't know, maybe 4 stars? Yeah, but there were a couple of stories that really fell flat. Stories I just couldn't like, So 2 stars? ...But the others kept me in suspenseful interest in the next page. OKAY a compromising 3 from me. I hope to read more from Clare Boylan soon. Maybe then I will have better judgement.
March 14, 2025
mi profe de language lo hizo de nuevo. aaaaaa veo venir un gran año literario
November 30, 2015
Amazing writing by an amazing Irish author. I intend to read everything word she has ever written. So sad that she is gone and can give us no more wonderful writing. Boylan is not to everyone's taste but I loved her characters and their predicaments and would recommend her to anyone who loves good writing and wonderful stories with unforgettable characters. May be too dark for some but I loved these stories!
April 27, 2016
The introduction Ms. Boylan writes is wonderful. The short stories which follow, however, are merely average. She writes as if she's trying too hard to be meaningful. There were some moments of wonderful imagery, such as these lines from "Appearances": "A frond of rhubarb jam dangled through a hole in my toast. I sucked it through from underneath.". But, for me, these instances were few and far between.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews