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Published Apr 2017
242 pages
Genre: Short Stories
Publication Information
A collection of fifteen stories depicting family life at its worst, best, and funniest.
A collection of fifteen stories, Jean McGarry's No Harm Done, depicts family life at its worst, best, and funniest, as if the author had conjoined the lunacy of Cold Comfort Farm with the bitter grievances of Dubliners.As the author writes in "Strong Boy," this might be "…because every family, rich or poor, is roughage."
The characters, gallant, goofy, gifted, and grim, include sickly mothers of a dozen children, boozy fathers with a gift of the gab, kids aspiring to be nuns and priests, or just to get out of town with a whole skin.
A section is devoted to one marriage made in heaven: a Jewish psychoanalyst devoted to his ex-nun wife. Another set of stories reworks familiar fairy tales, setting them in the wild present. No Harm Done (whose title is Irish code for wishful thinking) concludes with a truce to the war between the sexes, and indeed a 'solution' to the tragicomedy that is marriage and family.
"Starred Review. McGarry at her best pushes the envelope just past realism in a way that can be comic, creepy, and poignant, putting her in the school of Lorrie Moore and George Saunders." - Kirkus
"A gifted observer, records with fidelity the daily minutiae of life and introspection." - Publishers Weekly
"McGarry's thickly layered prose, with its stunning emotional accuracies, is always just on the verge of exploding into dream or fantasy." - Women's Review of Books
"Ms. McGarry's stories have the feel of paintings by Edward Hopper. Her characters are solitudinous and lonely, rarely funny, but they often carry with them, even in their defeat, a certain dignity. She is a writer who honors the human condition." - The Baltimore Sun
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Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
No Harm Done is Jean McGarry's ninth book. She has published novels, novellas, and story collections, including Ocean State, A Bad and Stupid Girl, and Airs of Providence, her first. A Rhode Island native, McGarry is Elliott Coleman Professor of Fiction in The Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University.
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