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Stories
by Stephen O'Connor
Paperback Original. In Here Comes Another Lesson, O'Connor, whose stories have appeared in The New Yorker, Conjunctions, and many other places, fearlessly depicts a world that no longer quite makes sense. Ranging from the wildly inventive to the vividly realistic, these brilliant stories offer tender portraits of idealists who cannot live according to their own ideals and of lovers baffled by the realities of love.
The story lines are unforgettable: A son is followed home from work by his dead father. God instructs a professor of atheism to disseminate updated Commandments. The Minotaur is awakened to his own humanity by the computer-game-playing "new girl" who has been brought to him for supper. A recently returned veteran longs for the utterly ordinary life he led as a husband and father before being sent to Iraq. An ornithologist, forewarned by a cormorant of the exact minute of his death, struggles to remain alert to beauty and joy.
As playful as it is lyrical, Here Comes Another Lesson celebrates human hopefulness and laments a sane and gentle world that cannot exist.
"O'Connor is a wizard at engendering sympathy for his characters, who are often simply trying to make sense of situations less certain and comfortable than they might wish." - Publishers Weekly
"A beguiling collection that merges off-kilter concepts and classic style." - Kirkus
"Each story in O'Connor's brilliant collection is a sunrise--a radiant apparition from beyond the outermost limits of ordinary language. Some stories are gritty, realist and spare, others feel lightning-charged with an otherworldly intensity, shockingly inventive but also frighteningly familiar, surprising and true." - Karen Russell, author of St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves
This information about Here Comes Another Lesson was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Stephen O'Connor is the author of three books: Rescue (a collection of short fiction and poetry), Will My Name Be Shouted Out? (a work of memoir and social analysis), and Orphan Trains: The Story of Charles Loring Brace and the Children He Saved and Failed (a narrative history). His fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, Conjunctions, The Quarterly, Partisan Review, The New England Review, and elsewhere. His poetry has been in Poetry Magazine, The Missouri Review, Agni, Knockout, and Green Mountains Review. His essays and journalism have appeared in The New York Times, The Nation, The Chicago Tribune, The Boston Globe, and elsewhere.
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