A Set of Variations; Twenty-Seven Stories
by: Frank O'Connor

Hardcover. NY, Knopf, 1st, 1969, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket. This collection of twenty-seven stories of Frank O'Connor, written between 1957 and his death in 1966, presents us with a stifling petitbourgeois society which seems deliberately organized to starve the mind and the emotions. Young people, crippled by poverty and sexual timidity, wait for their parents to die in order to marry; illegitimate children dream and mourn over families they never know; middle-aged bachelors nest with their mothers; priests live and die in terrible loneliness. Through all the stories runs the ubiquitous influence of the Church--like drink, a curse of the Irish. And yet somehow, this depressing material is turned in O'Connor's stories to charm. Clean copy.