Selected Stories

by William Trevor

Overview

A marvelous collection from "the greatest living writer of short stories in the English language" (The New Yorker).

Four-time winner of the O. Henry Prize, three-time winner of the Whitbread Prize, and five-time finalist for the Man Booker Prize, William Trevor is one of the most acclaimed authors of our time. Over a career spanning more than half a century, Trevor has crafted exquisitely rendered tales that brilliantly illuminate the human condition. Bringing together forty-eight stories from After Rain, The Hill Bachelors, A Bit on the Side, and Cheating at Canasta, this second volume of Trevor's collected fiction offers readers "treasures of gorgeous writing, brilliant dialogue, and unforgettable lives" (The New York Times Book Review).

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781101476529
Publisher:	Penguin Publishing Group
Publication date:	11/04/2010
Sold by:	Penguin Group
Format:	eBook
Pages:	576
Sales rank:	358,568
File size:	659 KB
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

William Trevor is the author of twenty-nine books, including Felicia’s Journey, which won the Whitbread Book of the Year Award and was made into a motion picture. In 1996 he was the recipient of the Lannan Award for Fiction. In 2001, he won the Irish Times Literature Prize for fiction. Two of his books were chosen by The New York Times as best books of the year, and his short stories appear regularly in the New Yorker. In 1997, he was named Honorary Commander of the British Empire. He lives in Devon, England.

Hometown:

Devon, England

Date of Birth:

May 24, 1928

Place of Birth:

Mitchelstown, County Cork, Ireland

Education:

Trinity College, Dublin, 1950

Editorial Reviews

The title of this hefty volume is a little misleading. It doesn't select anything, strictly speaking, but merely assembles the stories from William Trevor's last four collections, so that in effect it's a sequel to the huge edition of his collected stories that came out in 1992. Together the two books add up to almost 2,000 pages of short fiction—an enormous, Kiplingesque quantity of work—and they are more than ample proof that Trevor is one of the two greatest short-story writers working in English right now. The other is Alice Munro, and no one else is even close.
—The New York Times

Charles McGrath

Set mostly in England and Ireland, the 48 [stories] are wry, wistful, slice-of-life stories that have been likened to those of Anton Chekhov because of their acute observations, limpid prose and subtlety of presentation and their focus on neediness, loss and heartbreak. Though it may be heretical to say so, I think Trevor is superior to the good Russian doctor.
—The Washington Post

Ron Hansen

Gathering 48 stories originally appearing in four volumes, this follow-up collection to 1992's Collected Stories, Vol. 1 offers readers the luxury of immersing themselves in Trevor's unparalleled mastery of short fiction. Trevor's authorial humility and care for his characters and their lives is evident in each selection. Grand themes such as religious sensibility or grief from loss, to which Trevor returns again and again, reveal startling nuances and even more beautifully intricate textures when explored in the larger context of a collection. VERDICT If Vermeer wrote short stories, perhaps they would read like Trevor's, suffused as they are with light, clarity, and depth. This volume underscores Trevor's primary place in the pantheon of great short story writers and supports his status as one of the greatest literary artists of the modern era. His oeuvre suggests compelling connections and continuities among the work of de Maupassant, Chekhov, and Pritchett and that of the most gifted contemporary short story writers, including Nicola Barker and Anne Enright. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 7/10.]—J. Greg Matthews, Washington State Univ. Libs., Pullman

Library Journal

Sterling collection of short pieces by noted Irish writer Trevor (Love and Summer, 2009, etc.).

The author is a bard of quiet disappointments and muffled misunderstandings in small places, and often nothing much happens in his stories—just as nothing much happens in most people's lives. He is also a practitioner of the perfect, all-enfolding sentence, as with the opening of the opening story: "Violet married the piano tuner when he was a young man. Belle married him when he was old." You just know that there's a tale in between, and if it's set in a perfectly ordinary setting, that tale will be told without the grimness and ennui that have been in fashion in the short story in the post-Carver era. Some of his stories are anything but ordinary, as when a priest is taken by surprise by a man he has helped, only to be accused of long-ago improprieties: "a brain addled by recourse to methylated spirits," thinks said priest, "would naturally be blurred by now"—but all the same he caves in to the two-bit blackmail of a bleary bum, guiltless but still guilty. Priests often figure in these stories, which are, after all, mostly set in Ireland (or, when not, in Italy), and religious questions, often exceedingly minor, come into play. In one story, a Protestant boy relates the manifestation of a saint to a priest, who wonders idly why it couldn't have been a good Catholic boy to receive a sign of visitation: "Was it not enough that that march should occur every twelfth of July, that farmers from miles away should bang their way through the village just to show what was what, strutting in their get-up?"No, he learns, it's not enough, as just about everyone in these stories has to cope with the imponderables that life throws at them.

Arresting images and troubling questions—Trevor is a master.

Kirkus Reviews