Creatures of the Earth

Critics

• Approaching the silence

  Creatures of the Earth: New and Selected Stories by John McGahern 408pp, Faber, £16.99 John McGahern's Collected Stories was published in 1992, becoming a classic of the genre and, in his native Ireland, a bestseller. It offered itself as an assembly ... (read full critics)

  guardian.co.uk published on Sat, 25 Sep 2010

• The subtle art of suggestion

  Prematurely, John McGahern published his Collected Stories 14 years before his death early this year. To prepare this Selected Stories he obsessively polished and ruthlessly cut stories that, even as they then stood, for the most part seemed already ... (read full critics)

  spectator published on Fri, 17 Sep 2010

1 Review

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  Familiar McGahern territory

  The stories in this anthology are mostly set in the Leitrim and Roscommon landscape which McGahern wrote about so well and the themes are those he returned to again and again in his writing: memories of childhood; his relationship with a tyranical father; religion; sexuality; old age and death. To ... (continue)

  The stories in this anthology are mostly set in the Leitrim and Roscommon landscape which McGahern wrote about so well and the themes are those he returned to again and again in his writing: memories of childhood; his relationship with a tyranical father; religion; sexuality; old age and death. To this reader, it seems that he was always polishing the same material as a sculptor might polish a piece of rough granite until at the end, he has a small but perfectly smooth stone. In McGahern's case, his perfectly smooth stone was his final novel, That They May Face the Rising Sun, where all the tension of the earlier themes has been polished away and nothing is allowed to remain but the consolation of nature. These stories, as well as all the other novels, seem like only a stage in the preparation for that final result.

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Book Details

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• English Books
• Hardcover 366 Pages
• Edition: Rev Ed
• ISBN-10: 0571225667
• ISBN-13: 9780571225668
• Publisher: Faber and Faber
• Pub date: Nov 02, 2006

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