JOHN MCGAHERN

An enlightening collection of essays, reviews and speeches byone of the greatest writers of our era (Hilary Mantel) and the Irish novelist everyone should read (Colm Tóibín).Wise and compelling ... Elegiac and graceful. David MitchellI have admired, even loved, John McGaherns work since his first novel. Melvyn BraggMcGahern did not spread himself thinly as a writer. Nearly all of his creative energy went into what was central for him: the great novels and stories that are now part of the canon of Irish and world literature.Yet he spoke out when he felt he had something worth saying and his non-fiction writings are of great interest to anyone who loves his work, and to all those interested in the recent history of Ireland. This book brings together all of McGaherns surviving essays, reviews and speeches. In them his canon of great writers - Tolstoy, Chekhov, James, Proust and Joyce - is cited many times, with deep and subtle appreciation. His discussions of Irish writers who influenced him are generous and brilliant - among them Michael McLaverty, Ernie OMalley and Forrest Reid. His interventions on issues he felt strongly about - sectarianism, womens rights, the power of the church in Ireland - are lucid and far-sighted.

A haunting novel by one of the greatest writers of our era (Hilary Mantel) and the Irish novelist everyone should read (Colm Tóibín). A day, crucial and cathartic, in the life of a young Catholic schoolteacher who has returned to Ireland after a years sabbatical in London where he married an American divorcee. As a result he now faces certain dismissal by the school authorities. Moving from the earliest memories of both the man and the woman, the novel recreates their breaking of the shackles of guilt and duty into the acceptance of a fulfilling adult love.A beautiful, irresistible work of imagination.Sunday TelegraphWise and compelling ... Elegiac and graceful. David MitchellI have admired, even loved, John McGaherns work since his first novel. Melvyn Bragg

A landmark event: the collected stories of one of the greatest writers of our era (Hilary Mantel) and the Irish novelist everyone should read (Colm Tóibín).Wise and compelling ... Elegiac and graceful. David MitchellI have admired, even loved, John McGaherns work since his first novel. Melvyn BraggGentle, lyrical, an amorist of language, a natural historian of the soul.Irish TimesExquisite stories . . . Here is a Dublin of tatty dancehalls and uneasy courtships, of kisses in damp doorways and unfulfilled hungerings . . . Writing of extraordinary beauty.Guardian

The iconic debut novel by one of the greatest writers of our era (Hilary Mantel) and the Irish novelist everyone should read (Colm Tóibín).Elizabeth Reegan, after years of freedom - and loneliness - marries into the enclosed Irish village of her upbringing. The children are not her own; her husband is straining to break free from the servile security of the police force; and her own life, threatened by illness, seems to be losing the last vestiges of its purpose. Moving between tragedy and savage comedy, desperation and joy, John McGaherns first novel is one of haunting power.Marvellous.Susan Hill, TimesReminds one of the young Joyce.SpectatorWise and compelling ... Elegiac and graceful. David MitchellI have admired, even loved, John McGaherns work since his first novel. Melvyn Bragg

I am no good at letters. John McGahern, 1963John McGahern is consistently hailed as one of the finest Irish writers since James Joyce and Samuel Beckett.This volume collects some of the witty, profound and unfailingly brilliant letters that he exchanged with family, friends and literary luminaries - such as Seamus Heaney, Colm Toibin and Paul Muldoon - over the course of a well-travelled life.It is one of the major contributions to the study of Irish and British literature of the past thirty years, acting not just as a crucial insight into the life and works of a much-revered writer - but also a history of post-war Irish literature and its close ties to British and American literary life.One of the greatest writers of our era. Hilary MantelMcGahern brings us that tonic gift of the best fiction, the sense of truth - the sense of transparency that permits us to see imaginary lives more clearly than we see our own. John Updike

The stories in High Ground are set in ordinary places, in the streets and suburbs and dancehalls of Dublin, the small towns and fields of the midlands, the big houses of the beleaguered Anglo-Irish in the aftermath of their ascendancy, the whole changing country propelled in a generation from the nineteenth into the late twentieth century.

Sinclair; The Sisters; Swallows; The Rockingham Shoot; The Power of Darkness John McGahern, the leading Irish novelist of his generation, wrote a substantial number of compelling scripts for radio and television. This volume brings together five of his produced works, at the heart of which sits the previously unpublished The Rockingham Shoot, a dark and powerful play for television that concerns a Nationalist teacher whose attempt to prevent his pupils beating at a pheasant shoot held in honour of the British Ambassador leads to a shockingly violent incident. Collectively, these dramatic works offer an evocative and often stark account of a deeply troubled and divided nation.

John McGahern is considered by many to be the most important Irish prose writer of the last fifty years. McGaherns short stories equal his finest novels, reflecting both the richness of the ordinary, and the extraordinary, in the lives of a variety of individuals: the jilted lover waiting with would-be writers in a Dublin pub on a summer evening; the bitter climax between a father and son as a marriage begins; the fortunes and misfortunes of the Kirkwood family; and many more.For this revised edition, completed shortly before his death, John McGahern edited and deleted a number of stories from the Collected Stories that first appeared in 1992. This is the authorised edition of a modern classic.He writes with authority and gravity, and with an instinct for the most appropriate detail . . . His terse narrative seems free and full. He has the gift of being able to move fluently and unselfconsciously between a simple and a heightened style.Times Literary SupplementOne of the greatest writers of our era. Hilary Mantel, New Statesman

John McGahern (1934-2006) es uno de los más grandes escritores irlandeses, generalmente mencionado entre los mejores escritores contemporáneos en cualquier lengua. Sin embargo, es prácticamente desconocido para los lectores en castellano. Con la publicacion de la mas impactante de sus novelas, La oscuridad, los lectores podran descubrir a un escritor absolutamente extraordinario. La oscuridad retrata la entrada en la adultez de un niño sometido a todo tipo de maltratos por parte de su padre viudo, un ser amargado y fracasado que descarga todas sus frustraciones en los hijos, explotando literalmente por cualquier cosa. Patrick crece y cree encontrar una salida en la religion, pero los curas pueden ser tan hipocritas como su padre. Su unica oportunidad sera obtener una beca para la universidad, aunque Mahoney, su padre, hara todo lo posible para que fracase.

'My only concern', John McGahern once said, 'is that I get the sentence right and describe my world clearly and deeply.' 'The Country Funeral' witnesses three brothers, John, Philly and Fonsie Ryan, as they travel west from Dublin to Gloria Bog - the heart of the territory where so many of McGahern's stories take place - to attend the funeral of their uncle. Depicting the customs and rituals of the day, McGahern exquisitely traces how the brothers react to the area in unexpected and tender ways, and face their own feelings about the transience of life.

Elizabeth Regan, after years of freedom - and loneliness - marries into the enclosed Irish village of her upbringing. The children are not her own, and her husband is straining against his job in the police force. Moving between tragedy and savage comedy, desperation and joy, this is a novel of haunting power. This is the first novel by John McGahern, originally published in 1963. Elizabeth Regan, after years of freedom - and loneliness - marries into the enclosed Irish village of her upbringing. The children are not her own; her husband is straining against his job in the police force; and her own life, threatened by illness, seems to be losing the last vestiges of its purpose. Moving between tragedy and savage comedy, desperation and joy, "The Barracks" is a novel of haunting power.

Estos cuentos fueron madurando en mi cabeza y en las muchas versiones del material, pero en general comenzaron a partir de pequeños detalles. Otros empezaron como historias diferentes, que fueron reemplazadas por algo completamente imprevisto al comienzo. Los mas dificiles fueron tomados directamente de la vida. Pero si no los recreaba, los re-imaginaba y los dislocaba de su origen, nunca me habrian parecido satisfactorios. La imaginacion exige que la vida sea relatada de manera oblicua, debido a su necesidad de distancia. La ficcion tiene, entre muchas otras, la obligacion de ser siempre creible. La vida no tiene por que estar sujeta a semejante limitacion, y buena parte de lo que sucede es creible solo porque sucede. El dios de la vida es el accidente. La ficcion debe ser fiel a una idea central o a una vision de la vida. John McGahern Este libro incluye la totalidad de la obra cuentistica de John McGahern (1934-2006), considerado por la critica como el mejor escritor irlandes de cuentos desde James Joyce. Hasta que Adriana Hidalgo editora publico La oscuridad, la novela mas impactante de McGahern, este era un escritor practicamente desconocido para el lector en lengua castellana. McGahern recibio, entre otras distinciones, el Irish American Foundation Award y el Prix Etranger Ecureuil, ademas del doctorado honorario del Trinity College de Dublin.

SHORTLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE AS HEARD ON BBC RADIO 4 BOOK AT BEDTIME McGaherns masterpiece: the sort of book which you can give anyone of any age and know that they will be changed by it (Colm Tóibin) by one of the greatest writers of our era (Hilary Mantel).A book that can be read in two hours, but will linger in the mind for decades.Sunday TelegraphOnce an officer in the Irish War for Independence, Moran is now a widower, eking out a living on a small farm where he raises his two sons and three daughters. Adrift from the structure and security of the military, he keeps control by binding his family close to him. But as his children grow older and seek independence, and as the passing years bring with them bewildering change, Moran struggles to find a balance between love and tyranny.McGahern brings us that tonic gift of the best fiction, the sense of truth - the sense of transparency that permits us to see imaginary lives more clearly than we see our own.John UpdikeAn overwhelming experience.The TimesIt is compact but not dense, spare yet rich, and brimming with tension.Observer

The celebrated second novel by one of the greatest writers of our era (Hilary Mantel) and the Irish novelist everyone should read (Colm Tóibín) is a perfectly written tour de force (Sunday Times) and the best novel to come out of Ireland in many years.(Irish Times)Set in rural Ireland, John McGaherns second novel is about adolescence and a guilty, yet uncontrollable sexuality that is contorted and twisted by both puritanical state religion and a strange, powerful and ambiguous relationship between son and widower father. Against a background evoked with quiet mastery, McGahern explores with precision and tenderness a human situation, superficially very ordinary, but inwardly an agony of longing and despair.Wise and compelling ... Elegiac and graceful. David MitchellI have admired, even loved, John McGaherns work since his first novel. Melvyn Bragg

John McGaherns astounding memoir of his childhood:A glowing masterpiece.Hilary MantelThe one Irish writer everyone should read.Colm TóibínAs wise and compelling a book as any of his elegiac and graceful novels.David MitchellI have admired, even loved, McGaherns work since his first novel ... Memoir strips the skin off his fiction as he faces a desperate early life with great force and tenderness. Melvyn BraggThis is the story of John McGaherns childhood, his mothers death, his fathers anger and violence, and how, through his discovery of books, his dream of becoming a writer began. At the heart of Memoir is a sons unembarrassed tribute to his mother. His memory of walks with her through the narrow lanes to the country schools where she taught and his happiness as she named for him the wild flowers on the bank remained conscious and unconscious presences for the rest of his life. A classic family story, told with exceptional restraint and tenderness, Memoir cannot fail to move all those who read it.Magnificent ... Stand[s] supreme in the Irish canon.Irish TimesProfoundly beautiful.Daily TelegraphExtraordinary, spellbinding, spiritual.Irish IndependentIn a tremendously distinguished career, he has never written more movingly, or with a sharper eye. Andrew Motion, Guardian

The provocative novel by one of the greatest writers of our era (Hilary Mantel) and the Irish novelist everyone should read (Colm Tóibín).A writer of pornographic fiction, creates an ideal world of sex through his two stock athletes, Colonel Grimshaw and Mavis Carmichael, while he bungles every phase of his entanglement with an older woman who has the misfortune to fall in love with him. But his insensitivity to this love is in direct contrast to the tenderness with which he attempts to make his aunts slow death in hospital tolerable, while his employer, Maloney, failed poet and comic king of pornographers, comes gradually to preside over this broken world. Everywhere in this rich novel is the drama of opposites, but, above all, sex and death are never far from each other.Wise and compelling ... Elegiac and graceful. David MitchellI have admired, even loved, John McGaherns work since his first novel. Melvyn BraggA marvellous novel, deep, moving, rich and resonant, about love, lust, life and death.Sunday ExpressA novel that succeeds beautifully in doing what it sets out to do; to record and illuminate varieties of disenchantment.Times Literary SupplementAn admirable book, one of the finest I have read for a long time ... I cannot recommend Mr McGahern too strongly.Sunday Telegraph