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The Pedlar's Revenge: Short Stories
LIAM O'FLAHERTY IS ONE OF THE WORLD'S GREATEST SHORT STORY WRITERS. THIS COLLECTION RANGES FROM SENSITIVE NATURE AND ANIMAL STORIES TO CAUSTIC SOCIAL COMMENT, INTERTWINING FARCE, COMEDY AND TRAGEDY. A SATISFYING CHOICE...COMPELLS BELIEF..NEVER WAVERS FOR A SINGLE PHRASE.
- GenresIrish Literature
224 pages, Paperback
First published December 31, 1991
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About the author
Liam O'Flaherty
124 books74 followersPeople know Irish writer Liam O'Flaherty especially for his short stories, collected in
Two Lovely Beasts
(1948) and
The Pedlar's Revenge
(1976).
This significant novelist, a major figure in the literary renaissance, also wrote short stories. Left-wing politics involved him as was his brother Tom Maidhc O'Flaherty (also a writer), and their father, Maidhc Ó Flaithearta, for a time.
This significant novelist, a major figure in the literary renaissance, also wrote short stories. Left-wing politics involved him as was his brother Tom Maidhc O'Flaherty (also a writer), and their father, Maidhc Ó Flaithearta, for a time.
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
April 5, 2019
Powerful collection of short stories
O’Flaherty has a love for Homeric nature similes, which can be striking and enthusiastic, as in a description of an old country bachelor: “for six months he had scoured the island for a bride, unseemly like a rampant goat, which at the fall of autumn goes abroad upon the crags, malodorous, to leap on all and sundry with a wailing cry, in which there is a forecast of bleak death.”
At other times, they are just too, too much, as in his praise for the fresh bloom of the island women: “that impish laughter of the sea-blue eyes, in which nature seems to have engemmed a myriad sunbeams, and the snow-white silk of the cheeks, on which she paints bright roses that are kept radiant by an innate purity of soul.”
O’Flaherty has a love for Homeric nature similes, which can be striking and enthusiastic, as in a description of an old country bachelor: “for six months he had scoured the island for a bride, unseemly like a rampant goat, which at the fall of autumn goes abroad upon the crags, malodorous, to leap on all and sundry with a wailing cry, in which there is a forecast of bleak death.”
At other times, they are just too, too much, as in his praise for the fresh bloom of the island women: “that impish laughter of the sea-blue eyes, in which nature seems to have engemmed a myriad sunbeams, and the snow-white silk of the cheeks, on which she paints bright roses that are kept radiant by an innate purity of soul.”
February 14, 2023
Outstanding!
May 2, 2025
The best stories here are the ones that challenge orthodoxies around Irish national identity: satirical swipes at Yeats, depictions of grotesque greed in the Irish countryside, unromantic portrayal of the rural poor. The style is traditional, and at its worst veers on dull.
August 1, 2024
Why did no one ever tell me how good O’Flaherty’s short stories are?
February 18, 2016
The first story in this collection is excellent but the rest aren't so good. Mostly, this book is about rural Ireland, poverty, ignorance and superstition. Some of the stories are about wildlife : rabbits, horses, insects, birds, which I found quite unusual. Liam O'Flaherty writes well, but the content of some of the stories seemed not really worth the effort.
March 21, 2017
Some good, some bad, some weird. Worth a read to get an insight into past Irish rural life.
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews