The Collected Short Stories

Recently deceased, Irish author Healy produced distinctively beautiful literary work in many forms. This book reprints his brilliant 1982 selection of short stories, Banished Misfortune and Other Stories, with pieces published between 1972 and 2013. These stories reveal the stunning range of Healy's stylistic register, especially how finely tuned and consistent his depictions of women and men in struggles with life remained throughout his writing career. Each story here reads as a definitive statement about being human and at the same time reveals something new about Healy's art: his ear for speech, sophisticated imagery, and subtle symbolism. The editors emphasize the revelatory character of the author's fiction by including an early version of the seminal story, "First Snow of the Year" as well as a stand-alone extract, "Legal Times," from the 1984 novel Fighting with Shadows.