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Selected Stories of Mary Lavin
by Mary Lavin
One of the great overlooked voices of modern Irish literature, once hailed as "magnificent" by The New York Times, Mary Lavin's fiction is now being revived for a new generation of readers in this definitive volume, selected and introduced by Colm Tóibín.
During her lifetime, Irish American writer Mary Lavin was a prominent literary figure. Throughout the 1940s, '50s, and '60s, her stories were frequently featured in The New Yorker, compared to the works of Chekhov, James, and Wharton, and celebrated in major publications, ranging from The New York Times to The Irish Times. Lavin won prestigious awards, such as the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and the Katherine Mansfield Prize, and her influence extends to many of today's great fiction writers. Yet, despite her incredible success, Lavin's once acclaimed body of work has largely fallen out of print, lost and erased from the canon.
Now, An Arrow in Flight brings together sixteen of Lavin's most powerful stories, selected and introduced by Colm Tóibín. In witty and sharp prose, these tales explore familial tensions, relationships between men and women, and the social mores and biases of 20th-century Irish society, from the streets of Dublin to the fields of County Meath. Essential for any fan of contemporary Irish literature, An Arrow in Flight shines a much-needed light on "a master of the genre" (Los Angeles Times) who has, for too long, remained in the shadows.
"Lavin is especially gifted at exploring missed and mangled connections between lonely people, and at showing the ways women in patriarchal midcentury Ireland mount subtle but stout resistance to the master plots of marriage and gender expectations….Subtle, poignant stories from a writer who deserves to be remembered—and read." —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"Many of the well-crafted tales feel ahead of their time. This acute and uncompromising collection is a gift." —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"Mary Lavin's stories conjure sadness, profundity, hilarity and wildness out of thin air. They are simply masterful." —Colin Barrett, Booker-longlisted author of Wild Houses
This information about An Arrow in Flight was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Mary Lavin was born in Massachusetts in 1912 but moved to Ireland as a child. Her first collection of short stories, Tales from Bective Bridge, published in 1942, was awarded the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and launched her acclaimed career in this genre. Her stories appeared in The New Yorker and Atlantic Monthly, among other magazines. Her novels, including The House in Clewe Street, were also widely celebrated. She won several awards, including the Guggenheim fellowship and the Katherine Mansfield Prize, and she was President of the Irish PEN and Aosdána, the Irish Academy of Letters. She died in 1996.
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