"The Pram" by Roddy Doyle (1997)

Event Resources  Everyone Is Invited to Join Us for Irish Short Story Month Year Four

Ways to Participate-do a post on your blog and let me know about it-I will keep a master list and I will publicize your post and blog.

If you are an Irish author and would like to be featured, please contact me.   There are several options open.

If you would like to do a guest post on my blog on anything related to Irish short stories, contact me.

Roddy Doyle (1958, Dalkey, Ireland) is one of Ireland's most popular and prolific writers.  I have read and posted on eight of his novels.  In prior ISSM events I have posted on his short stories.   

"The Pram" originally appeared in his collection of short stories, Deportees and other Stories.  I read it in Anne Enright's anthology, The Granta Book of the Irish Short Story.  

"The Pram" is a very interesting story that centers on a Polish nanny working in Ireland for a family with a young baby boy and two girls, nine and ten.  The nanny loves the baby boy but she does not really like the two girls.  Her biggest duty is to take the baby in a pram on a daily walk, by the sea, along with the two girls.   Part of the pleasure and power of this story is in the interaction of the mother and the nanny.  The mother is condescending in the extreme to the nanny.   The story takes a turn to the dark side when the two girls tell their mother the nanny has a boyfriend, an Eastern European research scientist now doing remodeling on houses in Ireland.  The mother is really insulting to the nanny and the nanny begins to plot her revenge.   I do not want to give away too much of the plot.

"The Pram" is a story of the Celtic Tiger years, where Eastern Europeans did a lot of the physical work. we see Irish people patronizing their foreign employees.  Doyle makes use of Eastern European occult themes in his story.  The ending is quite horrific.  

Do you have a favorite Doyle novel or short story?  please share your thoughts with us.

"The Road to the Shore"; by Michael McLaverty (1976)

Michael McLaverty (1904 to 1992) was born in County Monaghan and then moved as a child to Belfast where he spent the bulk of his life.  He was a teacher and a principal in addition to writing two novels and a number of short stories about life in Northern Ireland.  During Irish Short Story Month Year Two in March 2012, I posted on a classic story by McLaverty "The Poteen Maker" about a school teacher who makes home brewed whiskey.  This was in part an act of rebellion against the government.   

"The Road to the Shore" is a wonderful story about the once a year road trip that a group of nuns make to the shore.   The personalities of the nuns and their relationship to the mother superior are beautifully developed.   You can tell the simple pleasure of this trip means so much to the women.  McLaverty makes us feel the beauty of the drive through the wondrous Irish countryside.  I do not want to spoil the plot action of this story other than to say I loved the close of story and the gentle wisdom of the reverend mother.

Do you have a favorite Irish short story?  Please let us know in a comment.

"Pussy Bratchford is on the Verge of Becoming a Good Christian" by Jamie O'Connell (2014 in Long Story, Short)

Event Resources  Everyone Is Invited to Join Us for Irish Short Story Month Year Four

Ways to Participate-do a post on your blog and let me know about it-I will keep a master list and I will publicize your post and blog.

If you are an Irish author and would like to be featured, please contact me.   There are several options open.

If you would like to do a guest post on my blog on anything related to Irish short stories, contact me.

Long Story, Short edited by Jennifer Matthews (an online literary journal based in Cork, Ireland) is a wonderful resource for short story writers and readers, world wide.  They normally publish one short story a month and focus on longer works of short fiction than one normally finds online.  

Last year during Irish Short Story Month Year Three, Cork based writer Jamie O'Connell kindly participated with a very illuminating Q and A that helped me understand much better the Irish, especially Cork,  contemporary literary world.  I was very happy to see the just published edition of Long Story, Short had a story by O'Connell with a very intriguing title, "Pussy Bratchford is on the Verge of Becoming a Good Christian".  Pussy is an H I V positive gay man that makes his living performing in drag shows. The story beautifully meanders back and forth in Pussy's life from his days growing up in Ireland to his current life.  Of course we want to see if we can gain an insight into how a good Irish lad  raised in a homo-phobic atmosphere in a  repressed culture became a gay cross dressing thirty five year old man.  

I found the character of Pussy very subtle and of significant depth.  O'Connell makes us participate in the process of the unraveling of the character of Pussy.  I enjoyed reading about the other men in who preform with him.  Like Pussy, i wonder what the life of the beautiful Brazilian who is a semi-lover of Pussy (Pussy does not often have sex because of reticence brought on by his illness) was back in Brazil.  I have spent some time there so I could visualize his probable terrible past.  Pussy contacted Aids when it was a short term death sentence but he has lived with it for years, with improvements in medication.   

The central person in Pussy's youth was his grandmother.  We are with Pussy in his adolescent memories of her, as he visits her when she lies dying at the hospital, and as he tries to deal with her death.

Pussy, as do the other performers, wears a hard mask.  He loves to insult those who come to his shows, to rip on his fellow performers.  It seems drag performers have a special scorn for lesbians and there are some really funny poignant lines around this.  I wondered if Pussy wishes he was a lesbian.

This is an excellent very knowing story about sex identity,masculinity and femininity, how living with pain, about being deeply alone, about the creation of self.  

You can read this story here. 

https://longstoryshort.squarespace.com/stories/

My Q and A with Jamie

http://rereadinglives.blogspot.com/2013/04/jamie-oconnell-question-and-answer.html

author bio

His debut short story collection Some Sort of Beauty received large national attention, featured in The Irish Times, The Sunday Independent, The Independent, Southword

Journal, Books Ireland, The Sunday World, The Sun, The Evening Echo (interview with Colette Sheridan), The Cork News, The Cork Independent, The Evening Herald, The Metro Herald, The Avondhu, 103FM, and Arena (RTE Radio 1). O’Connell was on the long-list for the Frank O’Connor Award 2012, and he presented a copy of Some Sort of Beauty to President Higgins in Aras an Uachtarain on 10 May 2012.

O’Connell came third in The Sea of Words International Short Story Contest 2012 (A competition for writers under 30 in 42 European and Mediterranean countries run by IMed and the Anna Lindh Foundation). Previously, he was selected to read at The Lonely Voice series of readings in the Irish Writer’s Centre (February 2011). He was Editor of One, a play by Michael Scott, which won the Best New Writing Award and Best Intercultural Dialogue Award at the Dublin Gay Theatre Festival. His short stories have been published in a number of journals including The Sea of Words (2012), The Poddle Dublin Review (2011), A Curious Impulse (2009) and The Bell (2009); he has been shortlisted for the Wicklow Writer’s Short Story Award (2008) and won the Thomas Harding Literary Award (2008). He has written for the Evening Echo, The Cork Independent and The

Herald.  He has an MA in Creative Writing from University College Dublin and a BA in English Literature and History of Art from University College Cork.

You can learn more about Jamie O'Connell and his work on

his web page

I have posted on the lead story in this collection.  I hope to post on the full collection soon.

"Jamie, nice story, I can relate to Pussy". - Carmella

They Were Found Wanting by Miklos Banffy (1937, translated by Patrick Thrusfield and Katalin Banffy) Part Two of The Transylvania Trilogy

The Transylvania Trilogy by Count Miklos Banffy (1873 to 1950, Hungary) should be counted among the greatest literary works of the European tradition.  I find it hard to do an adequate blog post on it that will not seem like hyperbole.   At the start of the book the publisher includes quotations from reviews in major publications which compare the scope and power of Banffy's work to that of Tolstoy. My first reaction was, as yours should be also, skepticism but having completed part one of the trilogy, I see this as a very apt comparison.  It is as least as good as the works in the post Austro-Hungarian Empire tradition of great writers like Joseph Roth, Gregor Von Rozzi, and Stephan Zweig.  The scope of Banffy's work is greater than these writers and the cultural depth is on a par with Proust.  It is a brilliant portrayal of the declining years of The Austro-Hungarian Empire, some have suggested new to Bannffy   readers can visualize him as a Hungarian Trollope. 

The story of how The Transylvania Trilogy came to be written and then finally translated into English by the great scholar Patrick Thrusfield in collaboration with Bannfy's granddaughter, Katalin Banffy-Jolen is itself fascinating and is explained beautifully in the introduction and preface. The work fully deserves to be called "among the greatest rediscovered European masterworks of the twentieth century".  It was a best seller in Hungary in the 1930s but lost all readership, and many of its potential readers, in WW Two.   It was reissued in Hungarian (the communist regime banned it for years) in 1982 and became a best seller and now we have Arcadia Press to thank for the English translation of this trilogy.

I have previously posted on the first novel in the trilogy, They Were Counted.

The Writing on the Wall is very much a continuation of the family and romance stories begun in  They Were Counted.  There are numerous intrigues, scandals, and political happenings described at length. Banffy loved his home land of Transylvania and he brings its natural beauty and rich cultural traditions to the fore for us.  The descriptions of the meals made be wish I was a guest at one of the feasts.  This is a story of the gentry and their world.  The sex was surprisingly graphic.  

There is a lot of political history of Hungary from 1909 or so in this book, OK a really lot, but I found it edifying and Banffy was in a position to get his facts right.  

This trilogy belongs, in my opinion, in the second tier of great European novels and should be must reading for anyone seriously into Austro- Hungarian literature and history.

I will soon read the final work in the trilogy and will try to post in more detail then.

If you have read any of Banffy's work, please share your thoughts with us.

Mel u

 

"The Dream" by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu (1848) A story by the best 19th Century writer of Paranormal Stories

Event Resources  Everyone Is Invited to Join Us for Irish Short Story Month Year Four

Ways to Participate-do a post on your blog and let me know about it-I will keep a master list and I will publicize your post and blog.

If you are an Irish author and would like to be featured, please contact me.   There are several options open.

If you would like to do a guest post on my blog on anything related to Irish short stories, contact me.

"Hi Daddy"-Carmilla

Please consider joining us for Irish Short Story Week. 

Joseph Sheridan le Fanu (1814 to 1873, Dublin) is at the very least the best 19th century writer of ghost stories.   He also created the first lesbian vampire, Carmilla.  He is a really great writer and almost everyone who reads one of his works goes on to read more.   Last year during Irish Short Story Week I posted on "The Child Stolen by Fairies" which really should be must reading for anyone who likes paranormal short stories.  (I have also posted  on two of his Ghost stories and I have posted on his simply marvelous novella, Carmilla-there is additional background information on le Fanu in these posts.)   He is descended from 17th century French Huguenots.  Among his most famous longer works are Uncle Silas and The House by the Church Yard.

Le Fanu was in many ways doubly an outsider in Irish culture, he was of French ancestry and he was a Protestant.   Some say you can see this influence in his works.  

Le Fanu often uses a framing device as part of his narrative structure, as do many writers of short fiction from his era, in which the narrator of the story is telling it to another person.  

I said last year that among the prevalent themes of the Irish Short Story are an obsession with death, the weak or missing Irish father, and the great impact on alcohol on Irish society.   I have read a number of East Asia short stories and these themes are not found nearly as much as they are in Irish stories.  "The Dream", not a top level Le Fanu story but very much worth reading, exemplifies all of these themes.  In a way the failures of the Catholic priest as depicted in this story also can be seen as part of the theme of the weak father.   

"The Dream" opens with a young girl at the house of a priest, begging her to come give her father last rights (the priest is relaying the story as if he were telling of a dream he has had).  He knows the father as a man who has neglected his family to spend the little money he makes drinking with debauched friends.  When the priest gets to the home, which is very well depicted in all its near famine era squalor, the local doctor is there.  He signaled the priest the man has little time left.  In fact he dies before the priest can say last rites.  As he prays with the family the man suddenly has an expression of total horror on his face and has come back to life.   The doctor tries to explain it but cannot.  The man tells a story of being at giant table in what appears to be the anteroom of Hell.  I don't want to tell too much of the story but he is allowed one more year of life.  During this year he gives up drinking (drinking was viewed then and still largely is, in Ireland and elsewhere as a sin of weakness, not an illness), returns to the days when he worked hard and uses no money for himself, fixes up the house and begins to pay his debts.  I will stop the story here.  

You can easily find this collection, which includes "The Dream" online.  

Please consider participating -Ruprecht

"Revenge" by Anne Enright (1991, from The Portable Virgin, 12 pages)

                                                                March 1 to April 1

Event Resources  Everyone Is Invited to Join Us for Irish Short Story Month Year III

Ways to Participate-do a post on your blog and let me know about it-I will keep a master list and I will publicize your post and blog.

If you are an Irish author and would like to be featured, please contact me.   There are several options open.

If you would like to do a guest post on my blog on anything related to Irish short stories, contact me.

Anne Enright is one of Ireland's leading writers, having won the Booker Prize in 2007 for her novel, The Gathering.  I have posted on a short story by Enright  during each of the last two Irish Short Story Months.  

Did you ever wonder why supposedly happily married couples place ads in publications like Craig's List looking for other couples to have sex with are like?  "Revenge", told from the point of view of the wife, is one woman's answer to that question.  I read the story in this very good anthology.

"This is a good story but very tame compared to my life" Carmilla

Mel u

Welcome to Irish Short Story Month Year Four

Event Resources  Everyone Is Invited to Join Us for Irish Short Story Month Year III

Ways to Participate-do a post on your blog and let me know about it-I will keep a master list and I will publicize your post and blog.

If you are an Irish author and would like to be featured, please contact me.   There are several options open.

If you would like to do a guest post on my blog on anything related to Irish short stories, contact me.

Please consider joining us for the event.  All you need to do is complete a post on any Irish Short Story and let me know about it.  I will publicize your post and keep a master list. Please let me know if you have any questions or suggestions. 

Today is the first day of Irish Short Story Month Year Four.  I first began this event in 2011.  I planned on a week and extended it to ten days.  In 2012 I planned on ten days and I extended it to four months and Irish short stories have become one of the central features of my blog and my own reading life.  Last year it lasted two months. This year I plan to continue  the event for a month. ( I conduct it in March to link up with Saint Patrick's Day events.)       I hope to post on a number of new to me writers, lots of classics, and some emerging writers.  In 2012 I held a mini-event, Emerging Irish Women Writers in which I focused on the work of ten writers.  This event fundamentally transformed my blog and my own reading experience as I began to establish contacts with the writers I featured.   It is my opinion that once a writer posts or publishes a story it is "fair game" to post upon but I sought and obtained permission from all the writers last year before I posted on their work.   Through this and subsequent contacts I became much more attuned to the creative process of writing and the business side of Irish literature .  Some of the writers I featured in 2012 have already begun to take their place on the world literary stage and others will.  This year I hope to feature a few more emerging Irish writers, men or women. 

Why Irish Short Stories?

An Irish short story writer wrote the most influential novel of the 20th century and beyond, another was the greatest poet of the 20th century (and perhaps beyond that), another was he most influential playwright since Shakespeare,  and one became a cultural icon and helped create a new sensibility.  Of course I am talking about James Joyce, William Butler Years, Samuel Beckett and Oscar Wilde.  Just the city of Galway with a population of under 100,000 has produced more great literature than many a country with a population of  over 10,000,000.   There are at least fifty writers of the second order in Irish literary history that would be considered national treasures anywhere else.  Irish literature is also the story of colonialism and the struggle to survive in the face of terrible hardships.  There has been a lot of ink spilled by people much more erudite than I am to try to explain why the Irish have produced so much great literature and why the short story is a dominant literary form there. In a literary "shoot out" between the combined forces of the USA and England I would be betting on the Irish.

  I have also begun to read Irish history to help me understand the stories better.  I see now that one must understand the impact of the famines, the power of the priests, and the wars for independence to understand the Irish short story.  I am sort of guided in my thinking by Declan Kiberds's great book, Inventing Ireland: The Literature of the Modern Nation.  He devotes a lot of time to a post-colonial treatment of Irish literature and this has helped me a lot.  I see lots of continuities between Irish short stories and the many short stories of India and the Philippines I have read.  There are interesting similarities between the Philippines and Ireland.  Both were colonized, both were made Catholics, both lost their native languages to a good extent and had their cultures largely destroyed, both never harmed any other countries and even though they are politically free now they are still dominated by outside cultures. 

I claim no expertise in any literary matter.  I am not an academic or a scholar.  I  love to read and want to help others learn about one of the greatest reading areas in the world, the Irish short story.  Going with my love of reading is a love of learning new things and I find this characteristics in the Irish, a love of learning for it's own sake, not for another end.  I admire their great pride in their history and literature.

I invite your participation..  You can do so by writing a post on your favorite Irish short story writer, either on your blog (send me the link) or by guest posting on The Reading Life.   You can also publish your own story here.  (I am willing to document my readership stats to potential guest posters if they ask me to.)  Last year we had lots of great posts.. Even if no one joins in I will push on (though perhaps it will be the expression of a "Lonely Voice"). 

I like short stories with elements of the "other world" and the Irish short story abounds in this. 

Meet the Staff for the Event

Rory, the handsome young lad at our right, a mere 614 years old, was born in the greatest of all leprechaun stories, "The Luck of the Irish" by the very American Stephen Vincent Benet.   Right below Rory, (a position she completely refuses in real life) we have Carmilla, brought to life by that great Irish writer with a very French name (descended from French Huguenots way back) Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu.  Carmilla was a Nobel woman driven from her lands by the advancing English armies and was the first lesbian literary vampire.  Though she is not totally averse to gentlemen callers.

At our left we have Ruprecht, a very striking cat, (maybe),  we do not know his history.  He just wandered in during Irish Short Story Week in 2012 and he never left.  Some say he is shape changer and perhaps a pooka but he is here to stay as long as he wants.    Both Rory and Carmilla feel they are totally in charge of the event and have some serious issues with each other. Rory insists Carmilla is in love with him and her response is "not for all the pots of gold in Ireland".   Last year a priestess from the time of Newgrange, before the pyramids were built, stopped by a few times but we have not heard from her yet this year.  We do hope to have some drop ins from the greats of the short story world.   

Anyway the idea is to have some fun, it is OK to be as serious or as whimsical as you like during the event.

Ruprecht

Rory

Carmilla