Collected Stories [Paperback]

Clare Boylan (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 15, 2002

Two decades of short fiction from a great Irish storyteller: "An imagination that transmutes reality into the stuff of magic." --Sunday Telegraph.

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 façade. 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.

Celebrating twenty years of rare accomplishment, The Collected Stories introduces American readers to a luminous and unforgettable writer of short fiction.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

The Irish short story writer Clare Boylan occupies much the same fictional territory as Fay Weldon: the place where ordinary occurrences like love affairs and motherhood and death take on the coloring of the extraordinary. The stories featured in Collected Stories range from 1978 to 2000, and the early ones are notable mostly for their sense of unease: "Housekeeper's Cut" is the tale of a cheating wife who's really just looking for a break from her role as wife and mom. Her expectations and her lover's misreading of them are treated with painful, unnerving clarity. Boylan's later stories are something else again: they strike an exacting balance between acerbic wit and tender compassion. Consider this passage from "Affairs in Order," about a philandering rogue: "He was a poet, and with the hair for it. In the plain stretches of life, women particularly remembered the buttery feel of his heavy gold hair." There's so much going on here: the gentle mockery of "with the hair for it," the sweetness of "the plain stretches of life," the understanding that a man can be loved, finally, for his hair. Boylan is also very good on madness: her crazy people have clear objectives (for instance, stealing a baby) and exquisite rationales. By the end of this superb, funny, delicate collection, you're hard-pressed to tell who is mad and who is sane, and it's a deliciously unmoored feeling. --Claire Dederer

From Publishers Weekly

Irish writer Boylan is better known as a novelist (Beloved Stranger, etc.), but this collection of 38 short stories is a pleasing showcase for her quirky plotting and deceptively simple, smooth prose style. The shorter stories are more effective, most notably "My Son the Hero," in which a mother decides that her doltish adult son has committed a murder and takes matters into her own hands. "The Stolen Child" offers a series of musings on the nature of babies after a woman indulges her fascination with infants by briefly kidnapping the child of a woman with seven bratty, out-of-control kids. "The Little Madonna" takes a broader perspective on the issue of children, as an older woman offers a series of thought-provoking ruminations on how modern sexuality has affected child raising after she sees a tabloid story about the birth of a "perfect" baby girl. The longer stories are less consistent, as Boylan tends to rapidly change direction and pursue divergent narrative lines, losing control of her intriguing conceits. Her odd, conceptual approach to the art of the short story is something of an acquired taste, but these tales trace the development of her Patricia Highsmith-like tone and meticulous storytelling. Though her range is narrow, she is an appealing and idiosyncratic chronicler of the quirks and foibles of the Irish working class.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 416 pages
• Publisher: Counterpoint (October 15, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1582432619
• ISBN-13: 978-1582432618
• Product Dimensions: 8 x 5 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 13.9 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,072,935 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A revelation!, October 29, 2003

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This review is from: Collected Stories (Paperback)

Clare Boylan is quite an interesting author. Her warped, dark and twisted visions of love affairs, motherhood and broken hearts are mirrored in this unique collection of short stories. At times she almost verges on magical realism, for there are some bizarre moments in some of the stories, but I believe she is a genius when she ponders the intricacies and oddities of human relationships. My favorite stories are "Affairs in Order," "My Son the Hero," and "The Stolen Child." Boylan is a true revelation. I recommend this book to those with a penchant for dark and profound stories.