An Arrow in Flight
Selected Stories of Mary Lavin
-
- $14.99
Publisher Description
One of the great overlooked voices of modern Irish literature, once hailed as “magnificent” by The New York Times, Mary Lavin’s fiction is now being revived for a new generation of readers in this definitive volume, selected and introduced by Colm Tóibín.
During her lifetime, Irish American writer Mary Lavin was a prominent literary figure. Throughout the 1940s, ’50s, and ’60s, her stories were frequently featured in The New Yorker, compared to the works of Chekhov, James, and Wharton, and celebrated in major publications, ranging from The New York Times to The Irish Times. Lavin won prestigious awards, such as the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and the Katherine Mansfield Prize, and her influence extends to many of today’s great fiction writers. Yet, despite her incredible success, Lavin’s once acclaimed body of work has largely fallen out of print, lost and erased from the canon.
Now, An Arrow in Flight brings together sixteen of Lavin’s most powerful stories, selected and introduced by Colm Tóibín. In witty and sharp prose, these tales explore familial tensions, relationships between men and women, and the social mores and biases of 20th-century Irish society, from the streets of Dublin to the fields of County Meath. Essential for any fan of contemporary Irish literature, An Arrow in Flight shines a much-needed light on “a master of the genre” (Los Angeles Times) who has, for too long, remained in the shadows.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
"Life itself has very little plot," says one of the narrators of these magnificent short stories by Lavin (Tales of Bective Bridge), who died in 1996. Rather than run a conventional course toward epiphany or redemption, each entry ends abruptly or ambiguously. In "A Cup of Tea," a stubborn college student and her equally stubborn mother clash during a visit home. The story culminates in an all-too-realistic moment of folly as the daughter comes close to understanding her mother but instead lurches into an over-intellectualization of the issue at hand. In "A Memory," a retired professor collapses in a fit of delirium after refusing to commit romantically to a former colleague he has been stringing along. A young man and an aging widow begin to fall in love in "The Cuckoo Spit" but go their separate ways after only a few days of courtship, unable to surmount their own ageism and anxieties about propriety. Many of the well-crafted tales feel ahead of their time. This acute and uncompromising collection is a gift.
