ISBN: 9780571224197

Synopsis In The Joke, a middle-aged man sits listening to his wife’s conversation on the phone, at once bitter and sweetly yearning; in The Cocktail Hour, a couple wander the night haunted, seemingly lost in a reverie of the jazz-age and the movies; in Matters of Life and Death, two young brothers spend the night at the house of the local doctor and his wife, and together the four of them end up in a late night dance…From Ireland itself to the United States, rural Peru to the mountains of the Himalayas, these stories collectively and individually demonstrate the complexity of emotion and memory that is associated with the very finest short stories, and bear testimony to the fact that this art form is still alive and flourishing.