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Sat 10 Oct 2008Celebrating disorder within the Irish short story
SHORT STORIES: Let's Be Alone Together: An Anthology of New Short StoriesEdited by Declan MeadeThe Stinging Fly Press, 213pp. €12.99
CURIOUSLY, THE short story triggers more anxious apologetics than any other genre. On the one hand, its affinity with a lost world of oral performance seems to mark it out as faintly outmoded. On the other, its fragmentariness taxes readers who can more readily get to grips with the rounded worlds of the novel. In Ireland, the legacy of so many unsurpassed practitioners, including James Joyce, Elizabeth Bowen, Mary Lavin, William Trevor and John McGahern, makes tackling this mode a daunting enterprise.
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