Lantern Slides: Stories
A collection of twelve stories set in Irish villages and cities, tracing the lives of women shaped by loneliness, love, and loss. Like images cast by a magic lantern, memories and desires surface through O'Brien's passionate and exacting prose. Family tensions, village gossip, romantic longing, and nostalgia for the Irish landscape run through each story. Between an opening sequence of eccentric village portraits and the title story's Dublin party, every tale quietly illuminates lives held together by little more than endurance.
Work Information
Stories that hum with secrets -- the lantern's beam falls on the hidden longings and quiet solitude of Irish lives.
## Lantern Slides By Edna O'Brien. Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1990. Winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction, 1990. Twelve stories moving between Irish villages and cities, each capturing — like the flash of a magic lantern slide — a moment of longing, regret, or nostalgia. Old wounds between family members, unconsummated love affairs, a widow destroyed by village gossip, a daughter's irreparable parting from her aging father: O'Brien works in the tradition of Joyce while bringing her own wicked humor and lyrical precision. Many stories first appeared in Antaeus, The New Yorker, and The Paris Review.
Review Summaries
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Praised as 'enchanting,' the collection was celebrated for O'Brien's passionate, voluble characters whose gift of Irish gab gives each story an intimate, overheard quality. The narratives were noted for their psychological depth and immersive internal monologue.
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David Leavitt called it a collection that 'digs deeper into the old ground than ever before,' while Thomas Cahill praised O'Brien's sureness and conviction as truth-telling about love and mortality. Some critics noted occasional lack of contextual grounding, but the emotional power of the work was broadly acknowledged.
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The collection leaves a quiet, heavy feeling. Social gatherings and holidays repeatedly dissolve into emptiness, and the unrelenting bleakness accumulates. Yet O'Brien's refusal of comfort is widely seen as a deliberate and effective choice that illuminates bare human existence with unflinching honesty.
Book Information
- Publisher
- Farrar, Straus & Giroux Inc
- Published
- 1990-08-01
- Pages
- 223 pages
- Language
- 英語
- Size
- 15.95 x 2.31 x 24.13 cm
- ISBN-13
- 9780374183325
- ISBN-10
- 0374183325
- Price
- 7486 JPY
- Category
- 洋書/Literature & Fiction/Short Stories/Single Author
Twelve stories deal with love, incest, passion, aging, death, and loneliness
Reviews
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Five Stars
As described