The Collected Stories of John McGahern

John McGahern captures the music and pathos of Ireland like no other author I have ever read...I am right back on the farm of my youth, or in the middle of a tense conversation I had yesterday. His sense of the rhythms of season and relationships are so subtle they happen before you notice them By the time you are finishing 'Like All Other Men' you will be casting the movie. If you like short story collections, this one will stay on your shelf and eventually become as well-thumbed as my old one that fell apart and needed replacement

For anyone that reads, McGahern is an essential reading companion. He speaks for the man in Dublin, single running into middle age, or brimming it, and whose heart is a flutter for a nurse too far, or a far field where a father is dying into a landscape that nobody wants, that nobody values. McGahern maps the difficult transition of Ireland from a largely rural perspective, and then from the rural to urban. A sef confessed Joyce freak, McGahern has tried to emulate Portrait, and Dubliners in his own way. The rain will fall very gently on this mans tombstone.

This career-spanning collection deserves to stand on a short list that might include Dubliners, the collected stories of Hemingway, Katherine Anne Porter, K. Mansfield, Malamud (and you may as well include Maupassant, Chekhov, Babel, and Tolstoy on that list). The understated magnificence of these stories raises them to the level of high art. Read these now.

Whatever you're doing, stop now and go and buy this book. McGahern is among the greatest writers of short fiction of the modern era (a short list including Joyce, Chekhov, Hemingway, Babel), and perhaps the greatest practitioner working today. Tell your friends.

John McGahern may partake of the enormous literary legacy willed by Joyce, but he steps proudly from its shadow on his own two feet. "Wheels", the first story of the collection, demonstrates with its` very first lines the wonderful paradox McGahern achieves in the best of his writings: deeply descriptive economy. With but few words, an idea, location, feeling or time is evoked so substantially that the reader feels necessary to the story being told. McGahern's prose relies on the reader's interpretation and experience of the events depicted; one can read the same piece at different times and come away with vastly differing impressions. What you bring to the story is almost as important as the story itself. The argument could be made that this is the hallmark of great literature; while you are discovering the tale, you are also discovering yourself. While this is a natural recommendation for fans of Joyce, I urge anyone entranced by the magic of language to immerse themselves in this wonderful, tragic, funny, perplexing- so very much like life, book. Also in this vein, but with a different style, may I suggest "A River Sutra" by Gita Mehta