Search results for ""Author Julia O'Faolain""

Faber Stories, a landmark series of individual volumes, presents masters of the short story form at work in a range of genres and styles. Her story was this: she had been an orphan, her mother probably a whore. Brought up by nuns, she had lost her faith, found another, fought for it and been imprisoned. This was inexact but serviceable.On the twelfth day of her hunger strike, Maggy is unable to tell the difference between what is real and what is imagined. That's true of what brought her here too: was she IRA, or did she just take risks for the sake of a friend?Julia O'Faolain paints a portrait of young Irish girls and their unseverable connection, showing solidarity in places politics cannot reach.Bringing together past, present and future in our ninetieth year, Faber Stories is a celebratory compendium of collectable work.

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Her mother, who wrote vivid versions of old Irish folk tales, once said of the Irish Civil War: 'In those days... fear kept you from sleeping, but also from getting fat or bored.' Her father was Director of Publicity for the IRA during that savage conflict. He made bombs. A brilliant writer, his first book of stories was banned and he was summoned by his old IRA comrades to be court-martialled for writing it. He became one of Ireland's most celebrated writers and a radical dissident during the 1940s, challenging Church and State for their betrayal of the people's needs. His affairs with Elizabeth Bowen and many other women were betrayals of a more intimate kind. This was the backdrop to Julia O'Faolain's childhood.Her life is filled with great characters: Frank O'Connor, Paul Henry, Garret Fitzgerald, Hubert Butler, Patrick Kavanagh and Richard Ellman; and later, in their villas outside Florence, Harold Acton and Violet Trefusis, along with a cast of prim communists and raffish reactionary aristocrats.This is a book about being an outsider looking in, a trespasser in Ireland and in other countries - France, Italy in the late 1950s, the West Coast during the turbulent sixties - and also in other lives, the permanent temptation of the creative writer.

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Julia O'Faolain is one of the most important Irish writers of the past half-century. Under the Rose is a selection of short stories taken from her many celebrated collections.These are stories about families and relationships, religion and politics, new life and mortality, and their settings range from Ireland and the USA to Italy and France. O'Faolain exposes the delusions of sexual desire, explores the failings of the Church and unpicks the casual brutalities of a patriarchal society. In an afterword, she considers the art of the short story and the influences that continue to shape her work.Powerful, profound and unflinching in their reflections on human experience, the stories in Under the Rose are masterpieces of the form.Praise for Julia O'Faolain:'The assurance, range and diversity of her stories . . . proclaim a writer of daunting gifts.' Guardian'Entertaining and rich in comedy . . . gripping and moving.' William Trevor'A wonderful stylist and an exciting writer . . . Her work is joyous, urbane and intensely Irish.' Independent on Sunday

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