Collected Short Stories

by Michael McLaverty

Overview

‘His tact and pacing, in the individual sentence and the overall story, are beautiful … McLaverty’s place in our literature is secure.’ Seamus Heaney

Michael McLaverty, one of Ireland’s most important short story writers, painted with acute precision and intensity the Northern Irish landscapes – lonely hill farms, rough island terrain and the tight back streets of Belfast. Focusing on moments of passion, wonder, or bitter disenchantment, these short stories, in the compassion of tone and the spare purity of the language, are nothing short of masterly.

With an introduction by Seamus Heaney and an afterword by Sophia Hillan, this edition is a fitting celebration of a writer who has been compared to both Chekhov and Joyce. If you enjoyed Michael McLaverty’s short stories, you might also like his novels, Call My Brother Back and Lost Fields.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780856400407
Publisher:	Blackstaff Press, The
Publication date:	06/14/2012
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	312
File size:	866 KB

About the Author

Michael McLaverty was born in County Monaghan in 1904 and grew up in Belfast, spending childhood holidays on Rathlin Island.

He became a schoolteacher in Belfast and was later a headmaster there until his retirement.

One of Ireland’s most distinguished writers, he was a great influence on poet Seamus Heaney, who said of his writing: 'His tact and pacing, in the individual sentence and the overall story, are beautiful: in his best work, the elegiac is bodied forth in perfectly pondered images and rhythms'. Mc Laverty is best remembered for his short stories and for the novels Call My Brother Back (1939) and Lost Fields (1941). 

He died in 1992.

Editorial Reviews

A valuable collection of 23 expertly understated stories by the late Irish writer (1904-92). McLaverty’s primary territory was rural Ireland (around Belfast), and his crisp portrayals of aging farmers and pensioners lamenting lost youth and opportunity are matched by sensitive renderings of children who only half-understand their elders’ travail. His mastery of indigenous detail is brilliantly displayed in a moving account of a father and son’s arduous journey to church services ("Evening in Winter"), a devastating tale of "relocated" poor families ("Uprooted"), and the elegiac "After Forty Years" (often, justly, compared with Joyce’s "The Dead’). Even better are the story of a family mourning a son who "died for Ireland" ("Pigeons"); an explication of how poverty inevitably breeds lawlessness ("The Game Cock"); and a wry reminiscence of a schoolteacher sustained by his classroom science "demonstrations" ("The Poteen Maker"). A volume that (graced by Barbara Childs’s beautiful woodcut illustrations) pays overdue homage to a miniaturist who was one of the masters.

Kirkus Reviews