Creatures of the Earth: New and Selected Stories

by John McGahern

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 '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 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.

Genres: Short Stories, Fiction, Literary Fiction, Irish Literature, Ireland

416 pages, Paperback

First published March 1, 1996

About the author

McGahern began his career as a schoolteacher at Scoil Eoin Báiste (Belgrove) primary school in Clontarf, Ireland, where, for a period, he taught the eminent academic Declan Kiberd before turning to writing full-time. McGahern's second novel 'The Dark' was banned in Ireland for its alleged pornographic content and implied clerical sexual abuse. In the controversy over this he was forced to resign his teaching post. He subsequently moved to England where he worked in a variety of jobs before returning to Ireland to live and work on a small farm in Fenagh in County Leitrim, located halfway between Ballinamore and Mohill. His third novel 'Amongst Women' was shortlisted for the 1990 Man Booker Prize.
He died from cancer in Dublin on March 30, 2006.

Reviews

[Fionnuala]

Familiar McGahern territory
The stories in this anthology are mostly set in the Leitrim and Roscommon landscape which McGahern wrote about so well and the themes are those he returned to again and again in his writing: memories of childhood; his relationship with a tyranical father; religion; sexuality; old age and death. To this reader, it seems that he was always polishing the same material as a sculptor might polish a piece of rough granite until at the end, he has a small but perfectly smooth stone. In McGahern's case, his perfectly smooth stone was his final novel, That They May Face the Rising Sun, where all the tension of the earlier themes has been polished away and nothing is allowed to remain but the consolation of nature. These stories, as well as all the other novels, seem like only a stage in the preparation for that final result.

[Pierce · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've been reading this on and off for quite a while. Short stories between other novels. I think this might be the first time I've ever had a very strong personal reaction to a set of short stories.

McGahern has always been there floating on the periphery for me. A man who comes up regularly as an important Irish author, but I'd just never gotten round to reading him. He died in 2006.

I think this collection has a strong overlap with The Collected Stories; it has just two new ones. So if you could get your hands on either then either would do.

And I think you should, if you are at interested in what happened to Ireland in the latter half of the twentieth century. I've never encountered anything that encapsulated both urban and rural culture so completely. The interactions and social arrangements contained in these small, largely uneventful tales explains more than any number of histories you might read. It's all in here: the family, the farm, the land, the pub, hurling and football, the escape to Dublin, trips home, the drinking, marriage, the civil service, the teachers, the priests, the gardai, trade unions, Protestants, neighbours, mass, weddings, funerals.

A lot of the stories follow repetitive structures, slight variations on common experiences. It feels natural, cyclical.

I'm having trouble articulating how big and moving I found this collection as a whole. I feel like it has impressed something important upon me. It has not so much changed my outlook as given it foundations and scope.

[Morten · Rating 5 out of 5]

This must be one of the best books I have read for years. Each short story lives with you for a long time. It makes you wonder why people write 600 pages long novels about nothing.

[Toby Newton · Rating 5 out of 5]

A collection of taut and lean stories that chronicle the efforts of ordinary types to achieve lift-off from the circumstances of often constrained and parochial lives. Everyday (lack of) dramas, undergone, shouldered, accepted, because, what, as things are, is the alternative? Beneath their surface, slow-rolling human passions, coming to a simmer, and staying there.

[Leslie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Nice wee stories enclosed. I loved reading this while living in Ireland. Definitely worth a look.

[Sean Walsh · Rating 5 out of 5]

Magnificent!

[Padraig Barry]

After reading his novel, That They May Face the Rising Sun I couldn't wait to dive into this collection of short stories. Alas, I am a little disapponted, but I don't think its necessarily McGahern's fault. The stories are okay (not page-turning but interesting) but unlike the novel the writing doesn't make you want to reread the passages. This might have something to do with the short story format as opposed to the ebb and flow of a novel.