"One of the most distinctive voices in recent fiction and poetry."—The Guardian
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Like many of the great Irish writers before him, Dermot Healy first announced himself as a writer of intricate and innovative short stories. Healy’s stories are set in small-town Ireland and its rural environs, and in the equally suffocating confines of the Irish expat communities in London. Throughout these texts, Healy demonstrates a deep sense of compassion towards the marginalized and the dispossessed, without ever becoming sentimental or clichéd. The language is earthy and imagistic by turn, and he continually seeks to extend the formal boundaries of the genre.Gathering all of Healy’s stories together for the first time, this collection includes the long prose-drama “Before the Off” and Healy’s final short works, “Along the Lines” and “Images.”
Dermot Healy: The Collected Short Stories is part of a multi-volume sequence published by Dalkey Archive Press and edited by Neil Murphy & Keith Hopper. The series also includes Fighting with Shadows (2015), Dermot Healy: Collected Plays (2016), and Dermot Healy: Writing the Sky—Critical Essays and Observations (2016).
Dermot Healy (1947-2014) is the author of the memoir The Bend for Home, the collection Banished Misfortune and Other Stories, and four award-winning novels: Fighting with Shadows, A Goat's Song, Sudden Times, and Long Time, No See. He also wrote five collections of poems and thirteen stage plays.