Overview
"Celebrated for her powerful short fiction, Claire Keegan now gifts us three exquisite stories together forming a brilliant examination of gender dynamics and an arc from Keegan's earliest to her most recent work. In 'So Late in the Day,' Cathal faces a long weekend as his mind agitates over a woman with whom he could have spent his life, had he acted differently; in 'The Long and Painful Death' a writer's arrival at the seaside home of Heinrich Bèoll for a two-week writing residency is disrupted by an academic who imposes his criticisms and opinions; and in 'Antarctica' a married woman travels out of town to see what it's like to sleep with another man and ends up in the grip of a possessive stranger. Each story probes the dynamics that corrupt what could be between women and men: a lack of generosity, the weight of expectation, the looming threat of violence."
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Details
- ISBN-13: 9780802160850
- ISBN-10: 0802160859
- Publisher: Grove Press
- Publish Date: November 2023
- Dimensions: 7.3 x 4.9 x 0.8 inches
- Shipping Weight: 0.5 pounds
- Page Count: 128
Related Categories
With the publication of exquisite literary gems like Foster and Small Things Like These, Irish writer Claire Keegan’s reputation among American readers is slowly, but steadily, growing. The three elegantly-crafted stories collected in So Late in the Day: Stories of Women and Men will only enhance that increasing regard. In the title story, Cathal, a Dubliner on the cusp of middle age, faces a lonely weekend as he looks back on the demise of his relationship with Sabine, a French woman he met at a conference two years earlier. What Cathal originally regarded as innocuous and fully justified observations about his lover mutate into profound character flaws and reflections of his misogyny considered through Sabine’s eyes. Ruminating, he recalls a line he read, “about how, if things have not ended badly . . . they have not ended.” “The Long and Painful Death” is the story of an unnamed female writer who has won a highly competitive two week residency at a cottage on Ireland’s Achill Island once owned by German Nobel laureate Heinrich Böll. Her retreat is interrupted almost immediately by a German literature professor who wants to see the house, and when she hosts him for tea and cake he makes clear his views about her worthiness as even a temporary occupant of Böll‘s former home. The subtle air of menace that hovers over “The Long and Painful Death” emerges full-blown in “Antarctica,” which was originally published as the title story in Keegan’s debut collection. In this disturbing final story, a “happily married” woman uses the excuse of a Christmas shopping trip to Somerset, England, to find out what it’s like to sleep with another man. It doesn’t take her long to connect with a suitable candidate at a pub near her hotel. At first, their mutually fulfilling sex exceeds her modest expectations, but the story’s chilling final pages are worthy of a tale fashioned by Stephen King. In a book that barely exceeds 100 pages, it’s tempting to race to the end. But Keegan’s lapidary style almost demands that her work be consumed slowly, sentence by lovely sentence, as when a character feels “the tail end of a dream—a feeling, like silk—disappearing,” or when a hen’s plumage appears “as though she’d powdered herself before she’d stepped out of the house.” These stories invite rereading to appreciate how a skilled author can construct character and build narrative tension with unaffected grace.
With the publication of exquisite literary gems like Foster and Small Things Like These, Irish writer Claire Keegan’s reputation among American readers is slowly, but steadily, growing. The three elegantly-crafted stories collected in So Late in the Day: Stories of Women and Men will only enhance that increasing regard. In the title story, Cathal, a Dubliner on the cusp of middle age, faces a lonely weekend as he looks back on the demise of his relationship with Sabine, a French woman he met at a conference two years earlier. What Cathal originally regarded as innocuous and fully justified observations about his lover mutate into profound character flaws and reflections of his misogyny considered through Sabine’s eyes. Ruminating, he recalls a line he read, “about how, if things have not ended badly . . . they have not ended.” “The Long and Painful Death” is the story of an unnamed female writer who has won a highly competitive two week residency at a cottage on Ireland’s Achill Island once owned by German Nobel laureate Heinrich Böll. Her retreat is interrupted almost immediately by a German literature professor who wants to see the house, and when she hosts him for tea and cake he makes clear his views about her worthiness as even a temporary occupant of Böll‘s former home. The subtle air of menace that hovers over “The Long and Painful Death” emerges full-blown in “Antarctica,” which was originally published as the title story in Keegan’s debut collection. In this disturbing final story, a “happily married” woman uses the excuse of a Christmas shopping trip to Somerset, England, to find out what it’s like to sleep with another man. It doesn’t take her long to connect with a suitable candidate at a pub near her hotel. At first, their mutually fulfilling sex exceeds her modest expectations, but the story’s chilling final pages are worthy of a tale fashioned by Stephen King. In a book that barely exceeds 100 pages, it’s tempting to race to the end. But Keegan’s lapidary style almost demands that her work be consumed slowly, sentence by lovely sentence, as when a character feels “the tail end of a dream—a feeling, like silk—disappearing,” or when a hen’s plumage appears “as though she’d powdered herself before she’d stepped out of the house.” These stories invite rereading to appreciate how a skilled author can construct character and build narrative tension with unaffected grace.