Domestic Relations

by Frank O'Connor

Domestic Relations is a 1957 short story collection by Frank O'Connor. It includes the following stories:
- The Genius
- The Study of History
- The Man of the World
- The Duke's Children
- Daydreams
- Private Property
- A Bachelor's Story
- The Pariah
- Expectation of Life
- The Ugly Duckling
- Orphans
- A Salesman's Romance
- Fish for Friday
- Pity
- The Paragon

source:Wikipedia

260 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1957

About the author

Librarian Note: There is more than one author by this name in the Goodreads data base.

Frank O’Connor (born Michael Francis O'Connor O'Donovan) was an Irish author of over 150 works, who was best known for his short stories and memoirs. Raised an only child in Cork, Ireland, to Minnie O'Connor and Michael O'Donovan, his early life was marked by his father's alcoholism, indebtness and ill-treatment of his mother.

He was perhaps Ireland's most complete man of letters, best known for his varied and comprehensive short stories but also for his work as a literary critic, essayist, travel writer, translator and biographer.[5] He was also a novelist, poet and dramatist.[6]

From the 1930s to the 1960s he was a prolific writer of short stories, poems, plays, and novellas. His work as an Irish teacher complemented his plethora of translations into English of Irish poetry, including his initially banned translation of Brian Merriman's Cúirt an Mheán Oíche ("The Midnight Court"). Many of O'Connor's writings were based on his own life experiences — his character Larry Delaney in particular. O'Connor's experiences in the Irish War of Independence and the Irish Civil War are reflected in The Big Fellow, his biography of Irish revolutionary leader Michael Collins, published in 1937, and one of his best-known short stories, Guests of the Nation (1931), published in various forms during O'Connor's lifetime and included in Frank O'Connor — Collected Stories, published in 1981.

O'Connor's early years are recounted in An Only Child, a memoir published in 1961 but which has the immediacy of a precocious diary. U.S. President John F. Kennedy quoted from An Only Child in his remarks introducing the American commitment to land a man on the moon by the end of the 1960s. Kennedy described the long walks O'Connor would take with his friends and how, when they came to a wall that seemed too formidable to climb over, they would throw their caps over the wall so they would be forced to scale the wall after them. Kennedy concluded, "This nation has tossed its cap over the wall of space and we have no choice but to follow it."[7] O'Connor continued his autobiography through his time with the Abbey Theatre in Dublin, which ended in 1939, in his book, My Father's Son, which was published in 1968, after O'Connor's death.

Reviews

[Ben · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is probably the first book of short stories I read cover-to-cover. It's hard to say why. I found the voice of the casually introspective, indeterminately aged first-person narrator very sympathetic, which probably means that others would find it obnoxious, through nobody's fault at all. The stories have a melancholy but resigned tone which in my mind's eye corresponds perfectly with lower-middle-class life in Ireland. While some of the stories seem to be connected, there is an attractive ambiguity about all of them. Some people may have read "The Duke's Children" in school, which is where I first encountered Frank O'Connor.