Tales from the Irish Club
A Collection of Short Stories
-
- £7.99
-
- £7.99
Publisher Description
Tales from the Irish Club contains 11 wry accounts of an enclave of Irish Americans in Pittsburgh during and after World War II. In this first collection of short stories by Lester Goran are the often comic, sometimes tragic tales of Jack Lanahan, the transcendental artist who carves nothing but wooden roosters; Long Conall O'Brien, haunted by the ghosts of prostitutes he has known world-wide; Mrs. Pauline Conlon, famous as the woman who outlives three husbands?until she meets Sailor Kiernan; and the night an image of the Madonna appears on the wall of Local No. 9 of the Ancient Order of Hibernians. Ranging from the grimly realistic to the fantastic, Goran's stories examine lives so unheralded that only the Irish Club, Forbes Field?where the Pirates break their hearts, and St. Agnes Church?where they attend school and prepare for eternity?know their joys and sorrows.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this collection of short stories, Goran (professor of English at the University of Miami and author of The Paratrooper of Mechanic Avenue) excels at painting the vibrant backdrop of an Irish American neighborhood; he's not quite so successful at portraying the characters and events in the foreground. Almost all of these begin with extensive backstory on a single character and take far too long to get to the plot. Goran does have a pleasant, almost musical tone, though, and that goes a long way toward making these readable, if not groundbreaking. In "Now That Maureen's Thirty," high school librarian Maureen is receiving anonymous notes and suspects that they come from the married assistant principal. Pauline Conlon weighs "Mortality" (appropriate, as she has buried three husbands and is now marrying a fourth). "The Payment" follows a returning Vietnam veteran who married a respectable woman but couldn't shake other, phantom women from his mind; he eventually "resumed his popularity among the whores, as if he had never left." These stories are divided into vaguely titled sections such as "First There's Life" and "Boys in the Age of Miracles" that do not do much to bring order to this sweet, but somewhat scattered, work.
