Celebrated for her powerful short fiction, Claire Keegan now gifts us three exquisite stories together forming a brilliant examination of gender dynamics and an arc from Keegan’s earliest to her most recent work.
In “So late in the day,” Cathal faces a long weekend as his mind agitates over a woman with whom he could have spent his life, had he acted differently; in “The long and painful death” a writer’s arrival at the seaside home of Heinrich Böll for a two-week writing residency is disrupted by an academic who imposes his criticisms and opinions; and in “Antarctica” a married woman travels out of town to see what it’s like to sleep with another man and ends up in the grip of a possessive stranger.
Each story probes the dynamics that corrupt what could be between women and men: a lack of generosity, the weight of expectation, the looming threat of violence.