Books about Mcgahern from Amazon.com

William Stoner is born at the end of the nineteenth century into a dirt-poor Missouri farming family. Sent to the state university to study agronomy, he instead falls in love with English literature and embraces a scholar’s life, so different from the hardscrabble existence he has known. And yet as the years pass, Stoner encounters a succession of disappointments: marriage into a “proper” family estranges him from his parents; his career is stymied; his wife and daughter turn coldly away from him; a transforming experience of new love ends under threat of scandal. Driven ever deeper within himself, Stoner rediscovers the stoic silence of his forebears and confronts an essential solitude.

John Williams’s luminous and deeply moving novel is a work of quiet perfection. William Stoner emerges from it not only as an archetypal American, but as an unlikely existential hero, standing, like a figure in a painting by Edward Hopper, in stark relief against an unforgiving world..
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These 34 funny, tragic, bracing, and acerbic stories represent the complete short fiction of one of Ireland's finest living writers On struggling farms, in Dublin's rain-drenched streets, or in parched exile in Franco's Spain, McGahern's characters wage a confused but touching war against the facts of life..
Price: $8.89 [Notify me when price goes down.]

With this magnificently assured new novel, John McGahern reminds us why he has been called the Irish Chekhov, as he guides readers into a village in rural Ireland and deftly, compassionately traces its natural rhythms and the inner lives of its people. Here are the Ruttledges, who have forsaken the glitter of London to raise sheep and cattle, gentle Jamesie Murphy, whose appetite for gossip both charms and intimidates his neighbors, handsome John Quinn, perennially on the look-out for a new wife, and the town’s richest man, a gruff, self-made magnate known as “the Shah.”

Following his characters through the course of a year, through lambing and haying seasons, market days and family visits, McGahern lays bare their passions and regrets, their uneasy relationship with the modern world, their ancient intimacy with death..
Price: $1.80 [Notify me when price goes down.]

In his award-winning novels and stories, John McGahern (one of “the greatest Irish writers”—The New York Times Book Review) explores the ordinary lives of men and women to reveal the intricate workings of the human heart and mind. Now, in All Will Be Well, he turns to his own life, telling the story of his childhood in the Irish countryside and the beginnings of his life as a writer.

McGahern grew up the eldest of seven children in County Leitrim, where North and South meet under the Iron Mountains. His early years were marked by his father’s violent nature, the selflessness of his mother—a teacher of uncommon independence—and the tragedy of her death when McGahern was only nine. With extraordinary poignancy, he describes her and how her love remained a source of strength for him and his siblings, helping them to survive their father’s tyrannical rule and, ultimately, enabling them to break free into their own lives.

McGahern traces his career as a writer as it takes him increasingly far from home—to Dublin, London, Paris, Helsinki, Spain, the United States—before it brings him back to the almost unchanged landscape in which he had grown up and which had indelibly shaped his life and work. His lyrical descriptions of the fields and quiet roads of his home catch the subtle beauty of one of Ireland’s least known counties, while his portraits of its inhabitants are drawn with great insight and tenderness. “The people and the language and landscape…were like my breathing.”

All Will Be Well is a haunting, illuminating memoir..
Price: $6.75 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Widely considered one of the greatest Irish writers by readers and critics alike, John McGahern has been called “arguably the most important Irish novelist since Samuel Beckett” (The Guardian) whose “spare but luminous prose” (Chicago Tribune) is frequently compared to that of James Joyce. In The Leavetaking, McGahern presents a crucial, cathartic day in the life of a young Catholic schoolteacher who, along with his new wife, returns to Ireland after a year’s sabbatical in London. Moving from the earliest memories of both characters into the present day, The Leavetaking recounts the couple’s struggle to overcome the suffocating influence of the church in order to find happiness in a fulfilling adult love..
Price: $3.99 [Notify me when price goes down.]

One of the preeminent Irish writers of our time, John McGahern has captivated readers with such poignant and heart-wrenching novels as Amongst Women and The Dark. Moving between tragedy and savage comedy, desperation and joy, McGahern’s first novel, The Barracks, is one of haunting power. Elizabeth Reegan, after years of freedom—and loneliness—marries into the enclosed Irish village of her upbringing. The children are not her own; her husband is straining to break free from the servile security of the police force; and her own life, threatened by illness, seems to be losing the last vestiges of its purpose..
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Reissued to tie in with the publication of John McGahern's new memoir, All Will Be Well

One of the preeminent writers of our time, John McGahern has captivated readers with such poignant and heart-wrenching novels as Amongst Women and The Dark.

In The Pornographer, Michael creates an ideal world of sex as a writer of pornographic fiction, while he bungles every phase of his entanglement with an older woman who has the misfortune to fall in love with him. But his insensitivity to this love is in direct contrast to the tenderness with which he attempts to make his aunt's slow death in a hospital tolerable. Everywhere in this rich novel is the drama of opposites, but above all, sex and death are never far from each other..
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