FAULKNER READER

What an unpretentious little book, and who would have dreamed it would be so full of first-rate short stories? Mr. O’Connor wrote from the 1930’s to the 1960’s, and may be one of the finest writers Ireland has produced, which is saying a great deal. Thank you and thank you again to Open Road Media and Net Galley for the ARC. It’s been a real joy to read!

O’Connor’s early life was marked by alcoholism and domestic violence, and he tosses these into the stewpot of his stories that is so congenial, so resonant, that we little know the pain he went through before he wrote them. The quality of the writing is consistent throughout, which is even more remarkable given its length, which clocks in at over 700 pages! At times poignant and wrenching, and at other times witty and a little naughty, though never breaching the bounds of good taste, Mr. O’Connor delivers.

His protagonists are ordinary people, all of them in Ireland. They live in small villages for the most part; some are wives and mothers, some are brave young lads; there are noble priests and those who are not as noble, but all of them are believable and create an instant bond with the reader. His overarching theme is to remind us, in his folksy, understated way, that all of us are human. He lets us know that whether we believe in God or whether we don’t, for the moment we are all each other has.

O’Connor lived through revolutionary times, and was no stranger to the Irish struggle, which is near and dear to my own heart. His famous opening story, Guest of the Nation, focuses on a card game that takes place between Republican soldiers and their prisoners. Its blend of the ordinary with the wrenching emotion that ran high at such a time makes it immortal. The soldiers’ ambivalence and humanity lends it much of its authenticity.

One of my own favorite quotes appears early in the collection in a story titled “The Luceys”, in which Charlie visits his uncle, a priest. Charlie thinks his uncle is eccentric and cannot fathom how the man thinks:

“One conversation in particular haunted him for years as showing the dangerous state of lunacy to which a man could be reduced by reading old books.”

May we all suffer similarly!

I loved the references he made to “a gang of women” outside of Mrs. Roche’s house in “The Drunkard”. I also laughed at his reference to “…the mood of disillusionment that follows Christmas”. And in “Darcy in the Land of Youth”, I liked how Mick traveled to work in England and “He found the English very queer as they were supposed to be, people with a great welcome for themselves and very little for anyone else.” Here I would hasten to add that I am descended of both Irish and English, though I tend to lay claim more to the former than the latter; Mr. O’Connor’s gift is in wryly touching upon the cultural nuances that sometimes lead to misunderstandings, and others to genuine disagreement, culture or no.

I could continue quoting marvelous passages, but I think it is better for you to ferret out some of your own, and let’s face it, if I haven’t sold you on this book right now, I never will.

Except for this one last bit, which is really a commentary on all strong short story collections: this time of year, many of us will have guests in our homes. If yours is a family that reads, you may choose to set something out in your guest room, and short stories are especially lovely for them to have, because whereas one may not finish a great thick book during a visit over the holidays, one can pick up a short story at bedtime and finish that story before turning out the light.

And the glorious thing is, guests don’t expect a book that is left for their perusal to be brand new; they can enjoy a well-thumbed book without worrying if they inadvertently crease a corner. Right now, you have the chance to get the book for yourself, finish it, and then leave it for company.

That’s a good thing to do, because in the end, all we have really is one another.

William Faulkner is one of the most celebrated and popular authors in all of American literature. With his widespread popularity, and stature within the literary world, a book such as this needs to be in print. The book basically picks up everything -- or nearly everything -- of Faulkner's that had not been published up to that point, including: short stories that were later made into novels, short stories published in various fiction magazines that were never collected in a previous Faulkner anthology, and Faulkner stories that had never before been published anywhere. Some of the first group are nearly identical to the books of which they would eventually become a part -- The Unvanquished; The Hamlet; Go Down, Moses; Big Woods; and The Mansion -- but some are radically different. The alterations made to these stories offer a fascinating peek into Faulkner's writing process. They also offer a taste of some of Faulkner's novels, and, thus, work well as a sampler: the reader can read these stories and see which of the novels he or she might like to subsequently pick up. The previously uncollected stories contain some real gems and are eminently worthy; also, only the most hard-core Faulkner reader will have read them before. The previously unpublished stories are not of a significantly lower quality, as one might expect; indeed, some of them are very good -- just as good, or better, as some of the published stories. In any case, they constitute a goldmine for the Faulkner reader. The same goes for the book as a whole: though this certainly does not contain his best work, it contains much that is very good, and everything else is worthy -- perhaps some are even superlative. To be sure, some stories are of less worth than others, but they are all vintage Faulkner, and this is an essential volume for both Faulkner fans and scholars.

I have not been this impressed and delighted by the written word, especially by short stories, in my entire life. Frank O'Connor's writing encapsulates universal wisdom and injects it into the everday lives of working class people struggling for understanding of the interstices of their heart and minds. There are marriages here, and deaths. There are relationships here, and growth. There are happinesses here, and despair. There are lessons here, and frivolity. But mostly there is a knowing heart which pries apart each chamber of itself, disclosing love.

One tends to know great writing by how one's own personal outlook and relationship to life grow and change during the course of reading a story, and if it's wisdom and greater articulate understanding of people, men, women, families, children, and life one searches for...look no further.

My particular favorite stories within this collection are "Expectation of Life", and "A Set of Variations on a Borrowed Theme." These stories moved me to tears. Not many writers achieve this...

There is a line from William Trevor (no stranger to the short story) on the back of the book that I think is highest praise that one writer can give another: "without adornment, he simply tells the truth."
We don't demand things so weighty from books anymore, and are probably likely to dismiss a person or a book that promises it, but I think the word at least gets at O'Connor's idea of a short story. The truth, for him, is a live person on paper, going through a period of his or her life where they understand something about either themselves or the world. When he taught writing, he insisted that his students write a one-sentence theme for their story: what is it saying, demonstrating - what truth is it getting at?
This seems an old-fashioned idea of the story, but nothing about O'Connor's work seems either old-fashioned or excessively schematic - his stories are as alive as writing can be while still having unity and weight, and they carry their truth with humor and humanity. The Richard Ellman introduction, I'm afraid, misses this completely. Ellman was a friend of O'Connor's in later life, but I don't think he understands his work very well. The introduction makes O'Connor sound like some sort of genial provincial, with the primary virtue of his work being a portrait of a vanished society.
But no writer of fiction who is just a chronicler can survive: it doesn't matter that today Anna and Karenin could simply divorce. The book is relevant because Anna and Karenin are both real on the page, as so many of O'Connor's characters are. Ellman's lack of understanding influences his selection: too many of O'Connor's later less inspired work is here, and many wonders are missing. Why did he leave off In the Train, for example? Sadly, this is the only collection that's in print, but most of the great stories are here, and they are inexhaustible.
After discovering this book, I immediately went out and read everything of O'Connor's I could find, including a biography, and I copied down a passage that I think shows the way in which he looked at people and the world. He was writing to a friend who had been estranged from his wife, and was now feeling extreme remorse as she was dying:
"On occasions like this we all feel guilt and remorse; we all want to turn back time; but even if we were able, things would go on in precisely the same way because the mistakes we make are not in our judgements but in our natures. It is only when we do violence to our natures that we are justified in our regrets, and neither of us is capable of that. We are what we are and within our limitiations we have made our efforts. They may seem puny in the light of eternity but they didn't at the time, and they weren't."
This is his truth: to discover people's natures, to see the essential in even the smallest actions, and get across the moments when people see themselves whole. Read this book: it's one to keep for life.

Generally, when it comes to literature, I'm fairly hard to please. That being said, I love this book without reservation. I've recommended it to and foisted it on friends for years now. Many of them react much the way I do: there isn't anyone else like Frank O'Connor.

The stories are lyrical, sharply and humorously observed, and told with elegance in an easy but precise idiomatic diction. O'Connor always gave his work the test of being read aloud, and this care for the sound and cadence of his prose shows on every page.

Then, there is O'Connor's feeling for people. Reading the stories, one gets the impression that he was an intelligent but fundamentally kindly, generous man. Even when a character in the stories does something that seems objectionable, O'Connor never loses sight of that character's humanity. There is no absence of modernist irony, and the irony can sting (as in "The Mad Lomasneys"), but it is never cruel.

O'Connor's stories take place in Ireland, but they are not circumscribed by a desire to depict Irish regional color or romantic notions about the place. He wrote what he knew and understood, and what he understood was the people he grew up with. If that makes him a regionalist, then so were Faulkner and John Millington Synge. In his own subtle way, O'Connor was a realist, and ultimately, these stories are universal: they touch places in the psyche and the human heart that are common to us all.

Any selection of one's "favorite" stories will be personal. To an interested reader, I would say, "Read them all." To friends who ask, I add that they should start with "Guests of the Nation" and "First Confession." These aren't his "best" stories, but I've always liked them both, they are typical of his best, and one must start somewhere.

When I've given 5 stars to a book, I've often had to argue with myself as to whether it deserved it. Not for this one.

That realism has a natural humor which needs no embellishment or exaggeration seems to be the guiding principle of the fiction of Frank O'Connor, whose nearly seventy short stories of the lower and middle class in Ireland, many of which were originally published in the New Yorker at a time when the magazine was the authority for the best new short fiction, are gathered in this collection published by Vintage. His settings are localized to villages and towns; his stories, unlike the plays of Sean O'Casey, give little indication of the Irish political situation of the twentieth century, rarely even mentioning the World Wars, and instead focus primarily on religion, marriage, and childhood.
O'Connor's portrayals of the church and the clergy, ranging from the slyly satirical to the somberly sympathetic, illuminate the influence of Catholicism on the Irish mentality and the often strained relationships between priests and their parishioners. In "News for the Church," a teenage girl goes to confession for carnal intercourse with an older man, but the priest cynically guesses she is merely brandishing a badge of honor to prove her sexual maturity to her married older sister. O'Connor sees the unrewarding side to being a moral compass, but he never suggests that a priest's work is all in vain.
Many of the stories are about the confusion of youth and are narrated by a child with the voice of an adult. "The Man of the House," for example, struck me as a quasi-parable of the Fall, an adult-oriented parody of a morality tale that is told to children: A boy (the narrator) is entrusted by his sick mother to procure for her a bottle of cough syrup, but a bewitching girl he meets at the drug store tricks him into sharing the temptingly sweet medicine with her, leaving him to face the consequences of his mischief. These stories tend to culminate in poignant moments that, while not exactly equaling the Joycean epiphanies of "Dubliners," resonate with aching truthfulness.
One of the most pointed stories explores a curious contrast between the Irish and the English: In "The Sentry," an Irish priest with a Catholic parish in England during World War II discovers an English soldier stealing onions from his garden and challenges the man to a fistfight. When the priest later learns that the soldier--a sentry--could be shot for deserting his post, he tells this to an Irish nun, who replies, "Isn't that the English all out? The rich can do what they like, but a poor man can be shot for stealing a few onions!" Of course, the point is that the soldier would be shot for deserting his post, not for stealing onions; but the subtext of the nun's statement is that the Irish tend to see the bigger picture.
O'Connor is a natural dramatist with an uncommon ear for sincere, fluidly colloquial dialogue; he never overdoes a situation because he trusts the inherent strength and vitality of his characters to draw our interest. Here we have a collection of people who delineate the culture of their nation, always remaining fiercely individualistic, speaking the same language as the English but refusing to identify with them.

Apart from the first few stories which were very short little pieces I really enjoyed this collection of short stories. Set mostly either in Dublin or in rural Ireland the author gives us some great character studies and slice of rural Irish life stories. The collection is well sequenced as we do come on the same places and characters a number of times in different stories. Thus giving the collection a nice flow as well.

In an interview published in THE PARIS REVIEW, Frank O?Connor stated that he wanted to be either an artist or a writer and chose writing because a pad of paper and pencils were less expensive than art supplies. O?Connor has an artist?s touch when he writes and this is evidenced in his many short stories, many of which can be found in this volume.
Most of the stories in this collection take place in Ireland in the years after the Southern Republic of Ireland became an independent nation. Some of the stories such as ?Guests of the Nation? which may be O?Connor?s best known story and ?The Martyr? have this struggle as a backdrop. Most of the stories are about ordinary people facing ordinary situations. The stories tell of people young and old, rich and poor, in a variety of situations, some enviable, others not. We find priests, some holy, others not, but all human. Parents and children face daily life. Some of the stories have tongue in cheek humor (?My Oedipus Complex?) whereas others such as ?An Act of Charity? deal with tragedy. In each of the stories, there is a dignity to the characters. The characters can be familiar, but are never clich?. While I admit to being biased in my praise of O?Connor?s works, since I love my Irish heritage, especially the great Irish writers, I believe that while O?Connor?s writing and characters are distinctly Irish, the emotions and struggles O?Connor writes of are universal and can find a spot in the heart of anyone who loves great writing.

For readers coming to Faulkner for the first time, or from having read The Sound and the Fury, the expectation is that his large collection of short fiction, some 900 pages in my edition, will be wall-to-wall southern gothic tales, post and ante-bellum stories of the south and its unique American culture. And indeed, in the Collected Stories there are tales of these aplenty. But refreshingly, Faulkner shows his great power as a writer by throwing a knuckle ball every now and again. There are a string of short stories in this collection which take place in the Great War and involve largely British characters (Turnabout). There is a story about aviators in the Great War (All the Dead Pilots). A story about homeless men in New York City (Pennsylvania Station) and even the writer writing of writers story (Artist at Home). Nothing is more refreshing to than to approach a writer the stature and reputation of Faulker, who made his bones in one type of literary fiction and realize that in addition to his well trodden paths he has range and depth of subject matter.

This is a good introduction to McGahern's work, who I personally think is under-represented in other short story anthologies.

One of the promos on the cover refers to McGahern as the best Irish short story writer since Joyce. Hmmmm.... not so sure about that for several reasons. I understand that the statement isn't intended to be direct comparison between the two, but it's unfair to both writers and to the reader. I would compare McGahern to the often over-looked Frank O'Connor instead.

While some of the stories included in this collection are set in Dublin, it's the stories set in the country where McGahern's characters, themes, and prose really work best. Like O'Connor, McGahern's best stories allow the reader to "see" what isn't said or what isn't done. It's the absences and the mis-fires between everyday people doing everyday things that resonate so achingly in the best stories in this collection.

I do like that the stories are arranged in such a way so that when a character or set of characters appear in multiple pieces, the reader finds herself pleasantly surprised to encounter someone again after having read about someone or something completely different. This organisation of recurrent characters or settings allowed me to create a mini-novel in my head and to think about the various conflicts, relationships, and absences even after I'd put the book down.

f you aren't already familiar with the short stories of Frank O' Connor, do yourself a favor, and buy this (relatively fat) collection. His stories will make you laugh ("First Confession"), weep ("Guests of the Nation", one of the most powerful anti-war stories I've ever read), or just lose yourself in the humanity of his characters. These stories seem uncomplicated, but that's part of the author's genius, the way he manages to give the stories such an emotional impact.

Although, in my opinion, the stories of Seán Ó Faoláin are slightly more nuanced and psychologically perceptive, it's a close call. Both authors are to be recommended highly.

This collection of Faulkner stories is a really mixed bag. I generally liked the Yoknapatawpha County stories best, and the ones that are connected (Two Soldiers and Shall Not Perish, and the Indian stories) are especially good. Some of his more famous ones like "A Rose for Emily" are actually the least interesting to me. They feel more like O. Henry trick endings and I know Faulkner has more in him.

Some of the stories are very confusing on the first read, but I think they make more sense the second time, and Faulkner at his best really should be reread.

If you want a more consistent (and connected) collection of Faulkner tales, try "Knight's Gambit" or "Go Down, Moses."

A terrific introduction to the world of Faulkner's fiction. Some of these stories "Wash", "Barn Burning", "All the Dead Pilots", and "That Evening Sun" serve as introductions to some of the characters that populate his novels. These 42 stories encapsulate a brilliant career, featuring a wide variety of styles and points of view.
I am not a big fan of short stories, but each of these reads like a mini-novel.
You will be engrossed and will want to go back and read them again.

A terrific introduction to the world of Faulkner's fiction. Some of these stories "Wash", "Barn Burning", "All the Dead Pilots", and "That Evening Sun" serve as introductions to some of the characters that populate his novels. These 42 stories encapsulate a brilliant career, featuring a wide variety of styles and points of view.
I am not a big fan of short stories, but each of these reads like a mini-novel.
You will be engrossed and will want to go back and read them again.

William Faulkner's work has influenced many writers. His extravagant language and quirky stories are the epitome of fiction. Having read this amazing collection of short stories, I have no doubt in my mind that Faulkner was a very interesting person -- I would've loved to meet him.
My favorite story is "A Rose for Emily"; the quirkiness and symbolism in the story is both beautiful and strange. I also like "A Bear Hunt," "All the Dead Pilots," "Wash," and "Two Soldiers" -- all of the stories have a very unique language. If you like good literature, I strongly suggest that you read this amazing book.

William Faulkner's work has influenced many writers. His extravagant language and quirky stories are the epitome of fiction. Having read this amazing collection of short stories, I have no doubt in my mind that Faulkner was a very interesting person -- I would've loved to meet him.
My favorite story is "A Rose for Emily"; the quirkiness and symbolism in the story is both beautiful and strange. I also like "A Bear Hunt," "All the Dead Pilots," "Wash," and "Two Soldiers" -- all of the stories have a very unique language. If you like good literature, I strongly suggest that you read this amazing book.

Reading these stories by Faulkner is like listening to your granddad tell about a town and county you want so badly to be real and are heartbroken that its not. These stories are some of the best ive ever read. Their beauty lies in their sense of believability and simplicity of the characters in them. Just like everday people

Reading Faulkner is like hearing the history of a town and county that you want so badly to believe is real and are heartbroken that it isnt. These are some of the best short stories ive ever read. Their beauty lies in the simplicity of the characters and the sense of believability that the stories carry with them.

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

After reading "A Mule in the Yard," "That Will Be Fine," and "That Evening Sun" I was reminded of why this guy is one of the greatest storytellers ever. I know, his writing can be dense and even a times nearly unintelligible, but patience and concentration pays off with Faulkner. And his use of point of view is amazing.

William Faulkner is a fantastic, interesting writer. This collection of short stories is as engaging and well-written as his longer novels, with stories and characters as real as memories.
Faulkner is a brilliant storyteller. Begin with "A Bear Hunt" and "A Rose for Emily." You will be captivated by this wonderful collection.

This is 900 pages of literary gold. Possibly the greatest author of the 20th century and here is a tomb of his short stories. If I were stranded some place and could only have one book, I'd be hard pressed to decide between this one and the complete short stories of Ernest Hemingway.

The tradition of the Irish story teller has been reborn in this century in her marvelous short story writers. None was finer than Corkman, Frank O'Connor. All of O'Connor's classic stories are here. O'Connor truly captures Irish life in the early part of this century. The wit and humor that are legendary among Corkmen is present throughout this book. This is one of my favorite books ever. I have given it as a gift too many times to count. Every person that I gave it to came back raving about it!

William Faulkner is not an easy Man to understand in his writings but in his complexity he shows strength, admiration and guilt all wrapped up in one sentence and as a reader...all at one time. The confusion and glory is one to beholdin. All of his words put together bring understanding to anyone's compromise. Faulkner is the master of great prose in an educated and complex way.
A writer to be treasured with a devotion likened to Shakespeare of modern time. Sharon lin andrews navarro

Recent circumstances, culminating in President Carter's charge that much of the country has difficulty accepting a black president, bear out the fears of many that Obama could end up being held hostage by his race. His may be a challenge merely to prove that he's worthy of the office rather than one of seeing his programs to completion. Fortunately, the financial collapse occurred the year before Obama's election, and the Iraq debacle was out of his control. So it's surprising that the state of the nation has suddenly revealed itself in such ugly and ignorant terms, going so far as to arm itself (literally) in anticipation of the "mysterious stranger" who has become our new leader. But even health care reform isn't worth another civil war.

If more Americans read Faulkner, it's unlikely we would have ever come to such an absurd and truly sad, even tragic, state of affairs. In defending a lawmaker who recently heckled the president during a key speech in the halls of congress (the infamous "you lie" taunt), another Southern Republican congressman was insistent that the offender had put three of his sons in the line of fire in Iraq. Such thinking mirrors situations like those in Faulkner (as well as D. W. Griffith's "Birth of a Nation"), which show Confederate fathers sending all their precious sons to certain slaughter for the sake of pride and purity, lest the Covenant between God and the Confederacy ever be broken. Faulkner captures the dark yet passionate motives behind segregation in the Grand Old South with his portraits of true believers who would go to any lengths to avoid the introduction of the smallest percentage of black blood into immaculate lines deriving their ancestry from the Almighty Himself (to make the point, Faulkner can frequently even get mathematical, e.g. in an instance where the ostracized is the offspring of an Octoroon!). Applying Faulkner's logic to Obama, one understands more clearly why Obama (who is 25% African-American heritage) is capable of tapping buried wells of resentment.

The story leading off this collection, "Barn Burning," could just as well be the last, since Faulkner's two protagonists--the "white trash" sharecropper, racist father, Abner Snopes, and his son, Sarty, who is deeply divided between his love of family and his horror at his father's immoral behavior--reach a resolution that points to hope for the future. Sarty does what he must: he turns his father in, leading to Abner's death but also to the hope of a better world, a future recognizing one community and one human race. Most impressive, however, is Faulkner's ability to place the reader inside the consciousness of a character at once-in-a-lifetime critical moment when the question involves living or dying, denying one's own father or doing the right thing. The conflict becomes the reader's; race becomes everybody's business.

Faulkner's deepest and fullest explorations of race and America are to be found in "Light in August" and his masterwork "Absalom! Absalom!" In both, characters whose skin is white but whose blood is "tainted" become scapegoats, receptacles for the violent sins of the world, unwanted and scorned by both blacks and whites. The short story "Wash," can be used as a short and simple replacement for some of the more difficult sections of "Absalom" as well as a concise statement for the final moments of Rev. Hightower's life in "Light in August"--a climactic moment during which the reader can't know for certain whether the character experiences a genuine epiphany of transformation or succumbs to regressive visions of a noble white knight on a high-stepping white steed (reminiscent of the posters Griffith used for "Birth of a Nation" to depict the heroic Saviors of the South--an image frequently used by Faulkner as a metaphor for the blind fidelity to a noble "Klan" on a God-sanctioned crusade to right grievous wrongs to the nation.

Faulkner shows that it's not the promiscuity that matters, or the white blood intermingling with the black (the "pickaninnies" littering the plantations in his stories serve as proof). It's the terrifying prospect of the least drop of black blood crossing the "holy" barrier that separates the races, and then showing up in the patronymic, matrimonial records of God's chosen. It is, on the one hand, a vision of grandiose, outsized, epic and passionate proportions and, on the other, deluded, infinitely sad, pathetic if not pathological, and potentially destructive to all.

Of course, Faulkner's themes go beyond race. Few writers are so insistent on probing the innermost layers of a female psyche as Faulkner (he practically takes up where Virginia Woolf leaves off), and no writer is as obsessed with the meaning of language itself. But for all a reader might wish it otherwise, Faulkner repeatedly gets back to tracing the consequences of obstinate pride and illusions of purity, which ultimately and unavoidably returns him to the subject of race. (Ironically, political correctness has frequently claimed Faulkner as one of its victims, accusing him of the very thing he is not--a racist). When Faulkner's language gets the least bit confusing, try repeating the following phrase as a key to his meaning, a mere three words that, more than any others, captures Faulkner's entire message: "Blackness is humanness."

It's debatable if whiteness, an "achromatic" visual frequency, is even a color. The misguided attempts to preserve its purity, through practices ranging from segregation to incest, are the manifestations of pride run amok, of a deranged mentality of that can in short order become a widespread disease. Faulkner simply can not make the point frequently enough, and some might even say it's still not enough: human beings are creatures of color. The imaginary color betokening an immaculate purity, on the other hand, is limited to saints--or members of a sub-human klan.

William Faulkner is one of our ancestors on my mother's side of the family. I have lots of Geneology to confirm this. I have not read the book but would like too. Please tell me how. Thank you.
Jeanette

In a word- overrated. Or, perhaps disappointing, dull, bad, or tedious might be more suited. My quandary is in having to relate how profoundly disappointing the Collected Stories of an acclaimed master like Frank O'Connor are. Recently, I was disappointed in the works of another Irish `master'- William Trevor- yet that is nothing compared to what I feel having finished O'Connor's tales. Trevor, as stuffy and rigid as his tales could be, occasionally alleviated them with poetry and insight. Not O'Connor. His tales are murky, filled with the worst Irish stereotypes (really caricatures, not characters), bad conversation, and just no real reason for most of the tales to exists, save as documenting how dull and dim the Irish of the 20th Century were. And conversation dominates almost every tale. They all follow a predictable pattern- a null start (similar to a Chekhovian zero ending, save pointless since we've no information at this point in the tale), piss-poor dialogue that complains about some person or some aspect of Irish existence (such as in The Lady Of The Sagas, where an old storyteller deals with smallmindedness, but not very well; or in Freedom, which shows up the hypocrisy in the IRA), and then a less than zero end. Or, to be cynical- zero starts, zero middles, and zero ends. The tales all blur into each other, as some prolonged forty year rant about life's utter futility and gray pallor. To read a paragraph or two of one is to sample the full range of O'Connor's palate. Grayness dominates the land, the words spoken, the characters, their loneliness, and whatever little things they are engaged in. The attempts at themes that resonate- childhood, rebellion, nationalism, religious strife, marital woes, the desire to leave Ireland, are all subsumed in the gray. Unlike Trevor or James Joyce, O'Connor never gets out of the mire his tales spread with his poor dialogue and narration, so his attempts at humor or pathos look and read all the same. There is almost no variegation to the results, and little variance from the literary ideals attempted. His tales are almost excruciatingly painful to read.... In a sense, Frank O'Connor's tales fail in much the same way that American short story writer Flannery O'Connor's tales fail- with a slight difference. Frank's characters are mere stereotypes, whereas Flannery's were not only stereotypes, but utter grotesques. That Frank O'Connor is described as a realist in his work is very interesting- wrong, but interesting. This is because it says something about the tendency of modern readers to conflate banality with realism- even if the banality is clearly not realistic, and exaggerated to the point of accidental stereotype, or intended caricature. I think this a key point, not only in dealing with O'Connor's oeuvre, and why it fails, but why so much of what passes for literature is so banal. There is no joy in the higher plane that art can take a reader or viewer to. All that art, these days, seems interested in is the laziness of banality, which can be fobbed off as realism, so that people with no talent can salve their egos by calling themselves artists. The real tragedy is that O'Connor, I believe, had genuine talent, but just didn't have a clue what to do with it. And that's the kind of real tragedy he simply could never see, nor write about.

Faulkner's "Collected Stories" (paperback edition) are excellent works of literature. They have a lyrical quality and depict bold characters. This collection of stories is my favorite of my entire library.
However, I originally purchased this book in April 2011, but found the printing rather smudged and many of the words were lighter than the rest of the text. I am ordering another copy of the paperback edition with hopes that the problem has been resolved. I'll report back.