Prematurely, John McGahern published his Collected Stories 14 years before his death early this year. To prepare this Selected Stories he obsessively polished and ruthlessly cut stories that, even as they then stood, for the most part seemed already perfect. He also added two stories, one of which, ‘The Country Funeral’, strikes me not merely as the best that he ever wrote but also as the one that most accurately epitomises the sort of subject that he chose and his unsparing way of dealing with it.

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