Foreword by Christopher Morash
For many years, there were two commonly accepted explanations for the extraordinary flourishing of the Irish short story--neither of which was either entirely wrong or entirely convincing.
The first starts from the premise that a centuries-old Irish-language oral story-telling tradition forms a sort of seed bed for the Irish short story, an endlessly fertile imaginative loam out of which tales continuously sprout. This is the kind of explanation that has, if nothing else, a satisfying narrative appeal of its own, and it is certainly true in some instances. The book you are holding opens with a tale by William Carleton, whose
Traits and Stories of the Irish Peasantry were reworkings of the folk tales Carleton had heard growing up in rural County Tyrone, while the Irish-language short stories of Galway-born Padraic Conaire (one of whose stories is included here) show a deep debt to the folkloric tradition into which he was born. Other Irish writers from the early decades of the twentieth century, such as Lady Gregory, collected tales from what they saw as a disappearing folk culture, and 'The Priest That Was Called Mad' (1906), included here, has its origins in the cottages around her home in Coole Park, in County Galway.
However, like all good soils, this origin story is both rich and crumbly. It is less convincing when we rum to Carleton's near contemporary, Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, who lived his entire life in Dublin's literary circles, far from folk tales told around a cottage hearth. His gothic stories - like 'The For tunes of Sir Robert Ardagh' (1838), included here - may have the feel of a tale told around a fire, but only if we imagine the fire laid in the marble fireplace in one of Dublin's Georgian townhouses. In other words, even when the rural folk tradition was alive and thriving, it required an act of translation.
The second explanation for the continuing vitality of the Irish short story might be considered a version of the first, with a bit more historical and sociological elaboration. It goes like this: the fractured nature oflrish history, ruptured by centuries of colonization, rebellion and a devastating famine, made it difficult, if not impossible, for Irish writers to produce the long, developmental narratives - novels - that were common in other European countries with a more secure sense of their pasts and futures. Hence (the argument went), Irish writers were thrown back upon shorter forms - the lyric poem, the one-act play, and the short story.
For more than one generation of Irish writers in the aftermath of the Irish War of Independence (1919-21), and ensuing Civil War (1922-23), this was an enabling fiction. If nothing else, it helped to explain the profusion of great Irish short-story writers in the middle decades of the twentieth century, a list that includes Sean O'Faolain, Frank O'Con nor, Liam O'Flaherty, Elizabeth Bowen, Mary Lavin, and Maeve Brennan, with Edna O'Brien appearing at the end of the period with her first stories in
The New Yorker in the mid-195os. In O'Faolain's case, his 1948 book,
The Short Story, would establish him not simply as one of the most acclaimed practitioners of the short story in the world, but also one of its principal apologists.
Again, however, there is a problem with this argument, not least in the recognition that in those same years that the short story was being proclaimed the most appropriate literary form for the discontinuities of lrish history, there was no shortage oflrish novels, among them what is arguably the greatest novel of the twentieth century: James Joyce's
Ulysses, from 1922.
With the passage of time, however, this argument, too, has lost its credibility. If Ireland in the middle decades of the twentieth was insular, under-developed, and facing an uncertain future, in the final decade of the century this situation would be completely reversed.
As its post-industrial economy boomed in the mid-1990s, the conflict in Northern Ireland reached a kind of resolution in 1998, and the moral authority of the Catholic Church shattered like a plaster saint being knocked from a shelf, Ireland went from being an inward-looking, repressed society, hemmed in by literary censorship and enervated by decades of outward migration, to become a prosperous, liberal, globalized, and ethnically diverse country, subject to the same pressures of most of the rest of the developed world, but no longer an outlier. In the process, the rich peaty soil of Irish peasant culture has been well and truly laid with fibre-optic cables.
If the earlier theory connecting the flourishing of the short story in Ireland in the 1930s and 1940s to a fractured, under-developed culture were accurate, we should have expected the short story to have withered in the twenty-first century. Instead, however, it has thrived. What is more, it has thrived on its own terms, and not at the expense of the Irish novel, which is also experiencing a kind of golden age. Most of the recent short-story writers included in this volume are also novelists, among them recent winners of the Booker Prize and of the Dublin Literary Award, the world's richest for a single novel. Little wonder that there has been talk - and not just in the usual Dublin pubs - of a golden age of Irish fiction in the twenry-first century, cutting across forms, genres, and every imaginable version of lrishness.
The vibrant persistence of the short story in Ireland across such a history of profound social change might make us inclined to ask: is there anything that binds together the almost two centuries' worth of stories collected here as 'Irish short stories', other than the fact that their authors live or lived in Ireland, and that they are all writing about Ireland. Even the latter insistence that the stories must be set in Ire land is a self-imposed rule for this collection, and it would be equally possible to fill a book with short stories by Irish writers
not set in Ireland.
And yet, if we take the longest (probably the most famous) story in the collection as a kind of exemplar - James Joyce's 'The Dead' (1914) - we begin to glimpse two distinctive features that echo across the decades.
The first is a certain insistence on the voice. 'The Dead' is a kind of symphony of voices, from its opening line: 'Lily, the caretaker's daughter, was literally run off her feet.' It has been pointed out that, in fact, Lily is not
'literally run off her feet' (she is still standing). However, the phrase Tm literally run off my feet' is what Lily would say if she were asked, even though the sentence is ostensibly spoken by a neutral, omniscient third-person narrator. What has happened here is that the voice of the narrator has picked up the inflections, the turns of phrase, of a minor character. It is as if the voice itself were able to colour the language, like a drop of dye dripped into a glass of water, lasting only until another voice moves into earshot, is picked up and adds its tincture to a mix that is in tum shot through with overlapping threads of direct speech. The result is a story whose essential fabric is the human voice.
In this respect, Joyce's story is not alone in these pages. The earliest story here, Carleton's 'Wildgoose Lodge' (1833), hinges around the contrasting voices of the self-righteous, very proper narrator, and the wild, phonetically rendered speech of the story's peasant characters; from the opposite side of the nineteenth-century social spectrum, Edith Somerville and Martin
Ross's stories (such as 'A Nineteenth Century Miracle', 1903) work in the same way. Flash forward almost two centuries to Lucy Sweeney Byrne's 'Echoloca tions' (2024), and what lingers in the mind after reading is not
so much the plot, as the sense of a speaker. Dig deeper, and you will find no purer instance of writing that revels in the sound of the voice than Roddy Doyle's 'Two Pints' (2020). Originally published as a series of social media posts (four of which are included here), these short pieces are entirely made up of the conversations of two unnamed men, meeting regularly in a pub for a couple of pints, where the human voice is gloriously, hilariously, front and centre, and talk has scant regard for facts or logic.
Of course, it could be argued that this fascination with the voice has long been a distinctive feature of Irish novels as well, from Maria Edgeworth's
Castle Rackrent (1800) with its garrulous narrator, to Anna Burns's
Milkman (2018). How ever, returning to Joyce's 'The Dead' as a kind of paradigm, something else emerges as a constant that is a distinctive feature of the short story, cutting across the voices' insis tence on their own importance. 'The Dead' is, among other things, a kind of ghost story, although this is not apparent until its final sweeping vision of an Ireland covered in snow. Sometimes, the ghosts that haunt the Irish short story are revenants from a broken past, returning to haunt the present, as in Le Fanu's tale, or in the flashbacks of James Plunkett's shell-shocked soldier in 'Dublin Fusilier' (1955). Elsewhere, the ghosts are personal, as in Eoin McNamee's atmospheric 'Sable' (2020), in which a woman returns to the decaying site of her past life. Across the decades, however, they keep on returning.
Throughout this collection, some of the ghosts we encounter are oflrish literature itself, so that we might even imagine the stories here talking to one another from very different lrelands. Lucy Sweeney Byrne's 'Echolocations' opens with a character watching a film of Elizabeth Bowen (although she is not named as such) walking for a final time in the r93os through rhe gardens of her family's Big House, Bowen's Court, in County Cork- the same moment about which Bowen herself writes in 'The Last Night in the Old Home' (1934). Likewise, someone once cold Sean O Faolain that they considered his story 'A Broken World' (1937) to be a version of Joyce's 'The Dead', whose main character, Gabriel, gives his name to the restaurant that is the setting for Eilfs Nf Dhuibhne's delicious satire, 'A Literary Lunch' (2012). And then there is Kevin Barry's 'The Apparitions' (2016), where the ghosts of earlier Irish writers Qoyce, Beck ett, Yeats) make an unnervingly literal appearance on the streets of Dublin, concluding with asuggestion that the final paragraph of 'The Dead' should be played on a continuous loop in the city.
The short story is often considered to be a slice of life; however, the Irish short story is typically more than that. As a brief, intense burst of writing, the short story flares up within the present of its own telling, much like lively con versation. However, what gives the short story its satisfying narrative form and emotional force is the intrusion into that all-absorbing present of something else just beyond the edge of language, something that disrupts what we thought we knew about the world, intimating that the world we thought that we were observing so closely is other than we think it to be. This awareness may erupt in the final paragraph, as happens in the classic short story, or it may seep out slowly, as happens in more recent writing; either way, this undertow is at the heart of the short story's particular magic.
Over the past two centuries Irish writers have found, in widely differing circumstances, that this aspect of the short story has been suited to the temper of their times. Whether we are considering the aftermath of the revolutionary period in the middle of the twentieth century, or the social revolution of the twenty-first century, the short story has consistently provided Irish writers with a form capable of comprehending their predicament and its attendant sense of living in an uncertain world transformed. In the end, it may be chat the final line of Frank O'Connor's 'Guests of the Nation' (1931) best captures what a great short story leaves in its wake: '.And anything that ever happened me after I never felt the same about again.'
Copyright © 2026 by Edited by Christopher Morash. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
