In the following essay, Eckley offers a thematic and stylistic overview of Kiely's short fiction.

In the following interview, initially published in the spring of 1987 by the Irish Literary Supplement, Kiely discusses his Irish upbringing, his creative process, and influences on his writing.

In the following essay, Casey notes the influence of William Carleton on Kiely's fiction and traces the development of his short stories.

To a greater degree than even he would perhaps admit, the content and technique of Kiely's fiction are dictated by a voice out of the past…. For more than thirty years Kiely has stood with one foot in the past and the other in the present, mingling joys and disappointments of the two worlds, and, so postured, he has managed to create a fiction that is more than credible; it is convincing. (p. 24)

In the following essay, O'Grady finds parallels between the fiction of Kiely and William Carleton.

At the time of Land Without Stars, World War II casts darkness over the British Isles. While Northern Ireland's soldiers fight with Britain against Germany, the Republic of Ireland remains neutral. The novel, then, chronicles perhaps nine months in the lives of two brothers who, at the beginning, return to their Northern Ireland home for the Christmas holidays. Davy Quinn arrives from the North, his brother Peter from the South, both to find the town crouching behind blackout blinds. (p. 54) Dissensi...

In the following laudatory review of The State of Ireland, Moynahan contends that “this richly varied and beautifully produced collection puts Benedict Kiely in the front rank of modern short-story writers.”

Benedict Kiely, a writer in whom are joined magnificent lyrical and comic gifts, is one of the most admired of literary figures in his native Ireland…. [The State of Ireland, a selection of his short fiction, which concludes with 'Proxopera,"] exhibits not only the remarkable continuity of his themes, attitudes, and abiding concerns, but also the ways in which, over several decades, these have deepened and enriched themselves. (p. 3) Kiely's art begins with a profound sense of pl...

In the following review, King provides a favorable assessment of The State of Ireland.

[The first meaning of "The State of Ireland"] is that it's a place where stories are still told, deliciously and by masters of the art, of whom Benedict Kiely is one, perhaps the foremost. His skill is such that we have to distinguish between writing stories and telling stories. Once you have seen how Mr. Kiely builds a narrative, you must admit that he is not doing what Joyce or Chekhov or Maupassant were doing. His is a different art altogether….

["A Cow in the House"] contains the stories of a man talking easily, of a man whose memories crowd in on him, some merry, some melancholy, but all demanding attention, so that their appearance on the page seems at times to follow an order dictated by the random operations of change, and inconsequentiality seems the ruling principle of life. Memories of lost days of youth in rural Ireland, the Ireland of small towns and small farms where "Edwardian days lasted until 1939", and lif...

In the following review of A Letter to Peachtree and Nine Other Stories, Keefe praises Kiely's storytelling ability and unique narrative voice.

Most of the stories in … The State of Ireland focus on strange pairings off, on mismatched people whose unlikely relationships lead to surprising revelations, if not to spiritual transformations. In some cases, the participants in Kiely's brand of "strange friendship" wind up reversing their roles and seeing themselves (and their counterparts) with new and deeper insight…. Kiely's experiments with human identity continue throughout this collection. Guides become the...

[Proxopera is important for] the insight Mr. Kiely gives into a disturbed community. His book, he says, is "a condemnation of the interference by violent men in the lives of ordinary people". His greatest achievement is in conveying, extraordinarily economically, and as if it was not the technical and imaginative feat that it is, the layers of time coexisting in the mind of someone who has lived all his life in one place…. All the time, Binchey is seeing the past alongside the present: ...

People, landscape, song, sex, religion and violence—this is what Ireland seems to be made of in "The State of Ireland," a novella and 17 stories by Benedict Kiely. It's a narrow world, yet in this case a narrow world seems to make for good stories. They're brilliantly contained, free of that centrifugal throw that deforms some of the more cosmopolitan writers…. Weather is still significant in Ireland, and topography. Religion figures there. People pay attention to t...

Benedict Kiely's control over his material seems loose enough, but is, in fact skilfully exercised in this free-wheeling collection [A Cow in the House & Other Stories], set mainly in pre-Troubles Northern Ireland. And 'this ground is littered with things, cluttered with memories and multiple associations', which pretty well sums up Kiely's particular gift. Each story is built up layer upon layer, grapevine upon grapevine of allusion, starting off in one direction, expanding ...

In the best sense of the word, Kiely is a local writer—that is, a writer who knows and loves a particular place and realizes that the life of that place can represent and clarify a larger world…. Kiely makes this affectionate commitment to place the center of story after story [in "The State of Ireland"], and his fiercest anger is reserved for those who violate it….

A Ball of Malt and Madame Butterfly is uniformly excellent. Mr. Kiely's style is bawdy and hilarious. He writes with spacious confidence and, it is probably necessary to add, compassion. His priests—there seems to be one on every page—have earthly weaknesses. Most of his other men have a weakness for the ladies. In "A Great God's Angel Standing", a priest takes Pascal Stakelum, "the notorious rural rake", with him on a visit to an asylum. Stakelum is m...

Benedict Kiely [is] an Ulster scholar, novelist, storyteller, talker, walker, bard,…: he knows Ireland from the stones up. And in his book about his travels around the island, All the Way to Bantry Bay, something of the true nature of the border country in Ireland emerges, something which would never be perceived by the Sunday Times Insight team if it researched for a thousand years, for that knowledge lies in the very seedbed of the mystical landscape—and in the intimate knowledge of the phys...

Benedict Kiely's novella deals with the sinister politics of Ulster. His title, Proxopera, derives from the terrorist tactic of having bombs delivered by proxy—in this case by a retired Tyrone schoolmaster called Binchey. The story, which is mediated through Binchey's consciousness as he drives into town with the bomb, deftly manages to be both mellow and tense…. This confusion is abetted by the way Kiely's proper indignation at terrorism falls back on reminiscences of &#x...