Frank O'Connor Omnibus

The finest editions available of the world's greatest classics from Homer to Achebe, Tolstoy to Ishiguro, Proust to Pullman, printed on a fine acid-free, cream-wove paper that will not discolour with age, with sewn, full cloth bindings and silk ribbon markers, and at remarkably low prices. All books include substantial introductions by major scholars and contemporary writers, and comparative chronologies of literary and historical context.

For the first time, the selected works of Frank O'Connor, the writer Yeats dubbed 'Ireland's Chekhov', in a single volume, edited by novelist Julian Barnes.

The contents have been intriguingly divided into eight narrative threads that influenced and informed O'Connor's oeuvre. War includes the famous 'Guests of the Nation', set during the Irish War of Independence; Childhood draws on autobiographical writings to present a revealing picture of the author as a boy, the only child of an alcoholic father and doting mother; Writers bears witness to his literary debt to Yeats and Joyce. The stories in Lonely Voices movingly demonstrate O'Connor's theory that in this genre can be achieved 'something we do not often find in the novel - an intense awareness of human loneliness'; yet they are counterparted by his wonderfully polyphonic tales of family, friendship and rivalry in Better Quarrelling. In Ireland come poems, stories and articles inspired by the native land he loved but never sentimentalized, while from Abroad the writer in exile discourses upon universally relevant themes of emigration, hardship, absence and return. Finally, Last Things contains O'Connor's thoughts on religion, the church, the soul and its destiny, but remains above all a celebration of humanity 'who for me represented all I should ever know of God'.

and Other Stories

My Oedipus Complex

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NEW selection of stories introduced by Julian Barnes

Frank O'Connor (1903-1966) is the author of such justly famous works as "Guests of the Nation", "My Oedipus Complex" and "First Confession" and numerous other fine stories, including "The Bridal Night," "The Luceys," and "The Long Road to Ummera."  O'Connor published works of  fiction and non-fiction continuously from the 1930s to the 1960s.  Most recently his biography of Michael Collins, The Big Fellow, has been published by Picador.

The story of the title deals with a little boy named Larry and his feelings towards his father. When his father returns home from World War II, Larry is resentful and jealous of losing his mother's undivided attention, and finds himself in a constant struggle to win back her affections.

The Genius

Frank O'Connor was the pseudonym of Michael O'Donovan who was born at Cork in 1903. Largely self-educated, he began to prepare a collected edition of his works at the age of twelve and later worked as a librarian, translator and journalist. When quite young he learned to speak Irish and saturated himself in Gaelic poetry, music and legend. When he was interned by the Free State Government he took the opportunity to learn several languages, but it was in Irish that he wrote a prize-winning study of Turgenev on his relase. 'A.E.' began to publish his poems, stories and translations in the Irish Statesman. Meanwhile a local clergyman remarked of him, when he produced plays by Ibsen and Chekhov in Cork, that: 'Mike the moke would go down to posterity at the head of the pagan Dublin muses.' Frank O'Connor lived in Dublin and had an American wife, two sons and two daughters. He published Guests of the Nation, his first book, in 1931, and then followed over thirty volumes, largely of short stories, in addition to plays. Frank O'Connor died in 1966.

Known as Ireland’s Chekhov, Frank O’Connor was a master of the modern short story, with an eye for capturing the spaces between our selves and our surroundings. The Genius brings together some of his very best stories, often told from the perspective of young children and forming a revealing portrait of coming of age in postwar Ireland. Humorous and poignant in equal parts, these stories are a lesson in craft from a celebrated, prolific author.

Frank O'Connor

'Father,' I said, feeling I might as well get it over while I had him in a good humour, 'I had it all arranged to kill my grandmother.' 
 
Praised as Ireland's Chekhov, Frank O'Connor was a modern master of the short story. From an amateur brass band divided by partisanship to English soldiers who befriend their Irish captors, and from a child's comic confession to the end of a small-town friendship, these four humorous and tragic stories refract universal truths through the prism of 20th-century Ireland. 
 
This book contains The Cornet-Player Who Betrayed Ireland, Guests of the Nation, A Story by Maupassant, and First Confession.

Frank O'Connor

The Cornet-Player Who Betrayed Ireland

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