Last Stories

by William Trevor Narrated by Simon Vance

Overview

With a career that spanned more than half a century, William Trevor is regarded as one of the best writers of short stories in the English language. Now, in Last Stories, the master storyteller delivers ten exquisitely rendered tales—nine of which have never been published in book form—that illuminate the human condition and will surely linger in the listener's mind.

Subtle yet powerful, Trevor's stories give us insights into the lives of ordinary people. We encounter a tutor and his pupil, whose lives are thrown into turmoil when they meet again years later; a young girl who discovers the mother she believed dead is alive and well; and a piano-teacher who accepts her student's serial thefts in exchange for his beautiful music.

This final and special collection is a gift to lovers of literature and Trevor's many admirers, and affirms his place as one of the world's greatest storytellers.

Editorial Reviews

The New York Times Book Review - Cynthia Ozick

Trevor's stories traffic in plots, fated or willed, and hurtful. They may be coiled in pity, but they are never benign; their pity is unregenerative. Nor do they carry broad social vistas or axes to grind or hidden symbols…Here you will experience no flashes of culminating revelation, none of those so-called epiphanies that decorate the endings of so many workshop products…According to Martin Amis…a writer in old age will naturally grow slack, and Philip Roth, in choosing retirement…offers personal testimony to the same supposition. Still, in this small, final, seemingly quiet but ultimately volcanic book of stories, Trevor denies and defies—maybe spites—the promise of decline. As for volcanic: his people, at the finish of each turning of circumstance, are stunned and stilled, like the molds lava once made of the victims of Pompeii. And it is as if he will never run out of plots; plots are everywhere, in the shops, in the streets, in the cafes, at the teller's counter in the bank, in the city, on the farm; in every human breast.

Publishers Weekly

★ 03/19/2018
This spare collection of 10 stories by the late Trevor (The Story of Lucy Gault) might be too bleak if its darkness weren’t skillfully counterbalanced by sly hints of humor and understated compassion. The stories are sharp and concise, containing whole lives in the span of just a few pages. The book as a whole has an elegiac tone, with death figuring heavily in many of the stories. Often, it’s death observed at a distance, as in “The Crippled Man,” in which two foreign painters speculate about the disappearance of one of the owners of the house they are painting, or “The Unknown Girl,” in which the former employer of a young woman killed crossing the street wonders whether she holds partial responsibility. Many of Trevor’s stories contemplate two interacting characters who have little in common, like the prostitute who pursues a picture-restorer whose memory is failing in “Giotto’s Angels,” or the very different widow and widower in “Mrs Crasthorpe.” The author keeps a distance from his characters, driven to incomprehensible actions by motives even they don’t understand. Readers familiar with Trevor, who died in 2016, will find satisfying closure, and those new to his work will find reason to go back and explore his previous books. (May)

From the Publisher

Praise for Last Stories

“Last Stories is the final, brilliant collection by Irish Master William Trevor.”—The Washington Post

“Trevor was our twentieth century Chekov."—Wall Street Journal

“The beautifully written tales in Trevor’s Last Stories, now published and collected in book form after his death in 2016, are elegiac and profoundly resonant . . . A master of understatement and elegant, pithy prose, William Trevor creates an air of ambiguity and leaves it to readers to put the pieces together of his characters’ situations.”—New York Journal of Books 

“William Trevor's prose runs as clear as water yet tastes like gin. The Irish author—who died in 2016, aged 88—was a master of understatement, depicting small lives with rangy precision. At its best his fiction earned comparisons with Chekhov; in turn, he influenced a generation of writers in Ireland and beyond . . . Trevor was and remains an author against whom other talents are measured. His work earns its place in the canon that 'time’s esteem' will keep alive.”—The Economist

“The stories are sharp and concise, containing whole lives in the span of just a few pages . . . Readers familiar with Trevor, who died in 2016, will find satisfying closure, and those new to his work will find reason to go back and explore his previous books.” —Publishers Weekly (starred)

“Beautifully composed stories . . . [Trevor] has long established himself as a writer of great charity for the ordinary person and sympathy for the hard knocks of the unheralded lives . . . Trevor’s characterazations step to the fore as the major aspect of his writerly genius . . . Trevor will long reign as a literary master."—Booklist (starred)

"Noteworthy for their striking openings and sometimes enigmatic endings that will leave readers pondering the fate of Trevor's characters long after finishing the final sentence, these stories fully embody his artistic gifts."—Shelf Awareness

“Highly recommended.” —Library Journal (starred)

"The master miniaturist’s final stories, written before his death in 2016, were among his darkest.. But there’s always comedy, as well as Trevor’s genius for compression and sly wit — and in the end, a sympathy for both victims and perpetrators that enlarges our consciousness of internal lives."—Vulture
 
“As always, Trevor navigates the rough seas of human relations with a new angle, fresh language, deep sympathy, and uncanny insight.”—Kirkus Review (starred)

“He is one of the great short-story writers, at his best the equal of Chekhov.”—John Banville
 
“[William Trevor’s] stories are formally beautiful and, at the same time, interested in the smallness of human lives. He was, as a writer, watchful, unsentimental, alert to frailty and malice. A master craftsman.”—Anne Enright

“A beautiful writer... I would not have become a writer at all had I not discovered his work.”—Yiyun Li

AUGUST 2018 - AudioFile

William Trevor has justly been called our twentieth-century Chekhov, and this audiobook is a fitting and memorable finale to his oeuvre. He is a master of many things, especially understatement and drama so quiet that you often don’t realize a bomb has gone off until well after the detonation. Simon Vance is the perfect interpreter of Trevor’s technique. His performance is cool and subtle, alert to variations on themes, shrewd about mood and color. Theft is a recurring motif here. Also, love buried but not forgotten, love obsessive or wholly imagined, betrayals between spouses, and lies between parents and children. And at least one murder. If either Trevor or Vance overplayed even slightly, it could be melodrama. Instead this brilliant collection feels like life. B.G. © AudioFile 2018, Portland, Maine

Kirkus Reviews

★ 2018-02-20
Ten short fictions from the late Irish master (1928-2016) explore love, betrayal, and the ways that people cope with life's blows.There's a distinct shortage of happiness in this book, not least because it's a reminder that Trevor (Selected Stories, 2010, etc.) is no longer writing. The stories themselves make up a grim group, dealing in theft, extortion, and infidelity. In the opener, "The Piano Teacher's Pupil," a boy's musical talent comes with a light-fingered larceny. The teacher exemplifies Trevor's uncanny skill in compression, defining the milestones of her life by one room and three sentences, noting how memory can ease pain: "If a beloved lover had belittled love it mattered less in that same soothing retrospect." Theft arises again when a prostitute steals the savings of a man suffering from a memory disorder ("Giotto's Angels"). "The Crippled Man" ends with a woman concealing her handicapped cousin's death to keep his pension coming. Trevor paints the cousins' lives in rich, sharp strokes while working in the marginal existence of two itinerant Carinthian house painters and the way a woman's tough economies might benefit from a carnal arrangement with a butcher. In "At the Caffè Daria," two women, once friends, meet years later after the death of the man who married one and then left her for the other. Another fickle male lover appears in "An Idyll in Winter," barely touched by the pain he cavalierly inflicts on his wife and a former pupil. "Mrs Crasthorpe" is a widowed woman whose name partly defines her as crass, but while she dies in alcoholic squalor, sympathy is stirred by her trials with a son who is a recidivist flasher.As always, Trevor navigates the rough seas of human relations with a new angle, fresh language, deep sympathy, and uncanny insight.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940170519309
Publisher:	Tantor Audio
Publication date:	05/15/2018
Edition description:	Unabridged

Read an Excerpt

The Piano Teacher’s Pupil
(Continues…)

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Excerpted from "Last Stories"
by .
Copyright © 2018 William Trevor.
Excerpted by permission of Penguin Publishing Group.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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