Description
Book SynopsisEvelyn Conlon is one of Ireland’s most important writers. She has published four collections of short stories, My Head is Opening (1987), Taking Scarlet as a Real Colour (1993), Telling: New and Selected Short Stories (2000) and Moving about the Place (2021) and four novels, Stars in the Daytime (1989), A Glassful of Letters (1998) Skin of Dreams (2003) and Not the Same Sky (2013). She has also edited Later On: The Monaghan Bombing Memorial Anthology (2004).
Telling Truths: Evelyn Conlon and the Task of Writing is the first book to provide a critical assessment of her work. Drawing on a variety of perspectives such as feminism, ethics, famine studies, mobility studies, translation studies, short fiction, narratology and historiographic metafiction, the essays gathered in this volume reveal that Conlon’s writing, characterised by sharp observation, insistently questions the predetermined course of female existence, explores alternative forms of freedom and ultimately reflects her commitment to seek and tell truths. The intersectional approach of the book is part of a current endeavour in Irish Studies to keep interrogating well established topics, to examine the elusiveness of others and to explore new boundaries through renewed epistemological and ethical positions.
Table of ContentsContents: "Women Behaving Badly" in Evelyn Conlon’s Short Fiction – Moving about the Irish Short Story: An Exploration of Evolving Style and Themes in Evelyn Conlon’s Fiction – Women’s Mobility in Evelyn Conlon’s Fiction – Hurtful Intimacy: Kinds of Knowing in a Pair of Evelyn Conlon’s Short Stories – Riffraff: Evelyn Conlon’s "Two Gallants Getting Caught" – Translating Evelyn Conlon – Rites of Return: Evelyn Conlon’s Not the Same Sky – Later On, Later on, and in Another Country – Prisons, Prisoners, the Death Penalty and Resurrection in Skin of Dreams and A Glassful of Letters, by Evelyn Conlon – Ethical Encounters with the Spectral in Evelyn Conlon’s Fictions – The Lookout: A Conversation with Evelyn Conlon.
