I have recently fallen in love with Claire Keegan’s short stories! This collection contains her earliest published works. Some of the stories are strange and leave me wondering what the point of such grotesqueness was. More than once, I flipped back through the story to skim it again so that I can understand the action better. Consistently, stories have a twist at the very end that makes each word of an entire meandering piece come…
Three friends get together to support their college friend Fern suffering from a seemingly incurable cancer. The friends, all writers, want to do all they can to support her, also a writer. Though Fern was the most financially successful among the group, they feel that certain negative comments from critics have shortchanged her literary career. As a parting present, they want to serve vindictive justice to her critics as a gift for Fern. What form…
Irish short story writer Claire Keegan here shares three succinct short stories to delight readers’ imaginations. Each of them bears her eloquent style with plot twists all the way until the last sentence. This collection has three stories about the tenuous relationship between women and men. “So Late in the Day” describes a romance as it evolves from courtship into engagement. In so doing, it comments on how the social mores in Ireland about marriage…
This short story tells a first-person account of an Irish child sent to live with relatives in the countryside. At the outset, she does not know whether she will ever return home again. She quickly discovers that her new guardians are kind and affectionate in a way that her parents never were. She grows to feel at home there… until something terrible happens to make her see her situation for what it is. Then her…
This tale, set in Paris, tells a sad story of an American man whose girlfriend is traveling on vacation in Spain. He meets an Italian bartender Giovanni and falls in love. At the time, such love is illegal in America, and while not illegal in France, it is culturally shunned. Renowned author James Baldwin captures what such social oppression can do to an innocent, loving relationship in that era. It ostensibly details a romantic tragedy…
This well-written short story, set in Spain, shares a shocking scenario. Before the opening of the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, a bride is found inside and asleep with a naked man. The thing is, the man is not her groom, and they do not know each others’ names. How did they break in? And why are they together in the first place? A police detective peels the metaphoric onion, layer by layer, but uncovers…
This book deserves to be the next A Christmas Carol in the English language. Surely, even Charles Dickens cannot outdo Claire Keegan. In this work, she touches on themes of religious hypocrisy in the Roman Catholic church in Ireland. The message of Christmas and of the Christian Gospel, with their themes of oppressed things becoming great, is juxtaposed against an entrenched church beholden to money, power, and a corrupt socioeconomic system. This month of March,…
In 1976, a 7.6-scale earthquake rocked the region around Tangshan, China. Hundreds of thousands died, and hundreds of thousands more struggled for survival after houses, essential services, and bridges were leveled. Thirty years later, one survivor Xiaodeng is an acclaimed writer in Toronto, Canada, but is still haunted by the events of that day, when she was just a child. She tries to piece together her personal life, now falling apart. In reconstructing her life…
In the early twentieth century, Harlem was the place to be for black culture. Many had recently moved northward from the South to try out city life. As much as they wanted to reinvent themselves, past culture, built on the Christian Scriptures, remained ever near. In a small Harlem church, a teenage son came to terms with his identity in a relatively short amount of time. This book starts with the beginning of his epiphany,…
Living around 100 years later, it’s easy to forget how much the Great Depression threatened to rip the social fabric of democratic America apart. Most know of the bank runs. Threats of social anarchy rippled across the country, especially in rural regions, as depicted in this book. Self-government was quickly veering towards becoming a plutocracy, the rule of money and power. Americans who made their way of life on Main Street lived in fear of…