Davy Byrnes Stories

by Richard Ford, Mary Leland, Molly McCloskey

The six prize-winning stories from the 2009 Davy Byrnes Irish Writing Award as selected by Richard `Foster ' by Claire Keegan, `Living in Unknown' by Mary Leland, `This Isn't Heaven' by Molly McCloskey, `The Road Wife' by Eoin McNamee, `Storm Glass' by Kathleen Murray, and `The Rescue' by Susan Stairs. The Davy Byrnes Irish Writing Award is sponsored by Davy Byrnes of Dublin. It is Ireland's biggest competition for a single short story and it aims to honor the great tradition of short story writing in Ireland and to encourage and reward excellence among current practitioners of the form. `To my American ear, narrators and characters in these stories seemed to enjoy expressing themselves, seemed to like the feel of words in their virtual mouths, seemed to think that important life was largely lived in language -in what we say to each other, about each other, remember of each other, in how we love, detest, ignore, demean and relish.'-Richard Ford

Genres: Short Stories

158 pages, Paperback

First published December 31, 2009

About the author

Richard Ford, born February 16, 1944 in Jackson, Mississippi, is an American novelist and short story writer. His best-known works are the novel The Sportswriter and its sequels, Independence Day, The Lay of the Land and Let Me Be Frank With You, and the short story collection Rock Springs, which contains several widely anthologized stories. Comparisons have been drawn between Ford's work and the writings of John Updike, William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway and Walker Percy.

His novel Independence Day won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1996, also winning the PEN/Faulkner Award in the same year.

Reviews

[K. Olson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Six beautifully written short stories. The frustration palpitates in Living in Unknown; the cold and emptiness seep in your bones from The Road Wife and Storm Glass; and the ever lyrical writing of Claire Keegan makes you breathe in sharply at perfect sentence after perfect sentence. Irish storytelling at its finest. #TBRChallenge