Frank O'Connor (the pseudonym of Michael O'Donovan) wrote some of the finest short fiction of this century. Although now only some of his two hundred stories are well-known, during his lifetime he had an international audience who agreed with William...

In the mid-1980's, someone asked the late Thomas Flanagan if he'd he read Erica Jong's last novel. "I definitely hope so," he replied.He was a man of lightning wit and great learning. His first novel, The Year of the French (1979), won a National Book...

Gentle and enchanted, the 24 stories of Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman, Japanese writer Haruki Murakami’s latest collection, are frequently brief, unassuming and understated—but never flat or vacant. Mr. Murakami presents new variations on familiar preoccupations: brooding mid-20’s or -30’s male narrators, adulterous lovers, and a...

Gentle and enchanted, the 24 stories of Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman, Japanese writer Haruki Murakami’s latest collection, are frequently brief, unassuming and understated—but never flat or vacant. Mr. Murakami presents new variations on familiar preoccupations: brooding mid-20’s or -30’s male narrators, adulterous lovers, and a...

"I saw life through a veil of literature." This statement in his autobiography defines something important about Frank O'Connor. After writing, reading was his most consuming activity. He read without method or grace, because he was both a writer and a self-taught person. Since he knew what he liked and disliked, he seldom hedged his bets. Thus, when he wrote about literature he often seemed too opinionated, too flamboyant. But as Richard Ellmann has noted, O'Connor "thoug...

[Some] of O'Connor's public experiences, first in the guerilla war and then in the Civil War, serve as a clear inspiration to some sixteen stories, most of which appear in his collection Guests of the Nation. In these stories, he argues the meaning of these experiences, seeking to express, artistically, the reaction of his countrymen to the agonies at the birth of their nation. This collection, O'Connor carefully notes, was originally written "under the influence of the great Jew...

The violence and idealism of the events of 1916 to 1923 created in Ireland a mood of national hysteria. At least that was the voice heard by O'Connor trying to capture those events in prose six years after. In fact, the two extremes between which Guests of the Nation vacillates are hysteria and melancholy, between thoughtless act and numbed thoughtfulness. Benedict Kiely detected in these stories a "genuine bliss-was-it-in-that-dawn-to-be-alive romanticism," an adolescent enjoyment of t...

A short biography of Irish writer and playwright Frank O'Connor (1903-1966).