Accessibility Tools

  • Content scaling 100%
  • Font size 100%
  • Line height 100%
  • Letter spacing 100%

Watercolour and neon

A cubist anthology of Irish fiction
by
July 2021, no. 433

The Art of the Glimpse: 100 Irish short stories edited by Sinéad Gleeson

Apollo, £25 hb, 766 pp

Watercolour and neon

A cubist anthology of Irish fiction
by
July 2021, no. 433
Sinéad Gleeson (photograph via author's website)
Sinéad Gleeson (photograph via author's website)

Back in my bookselling days during the early noughties, I spent a grey London autumn in the company of W.B. Yeats. My employers were Maggs Bros., an old Quaker firm and the queen’s booksellers, then based in Mayfair’s Berkeley Square: a venue that sounds glamorous but wasn’t, or at least not for me. The job involved much sitting in an underheated basement, beneath windows that offered a glimpse of passing ankles, cataloguing my way through stacks that bulged with a collection of Irish literature, predominantly by or associated with Yeats, assembled with frugal determination and frankly insane completism over decades by an autodidact bus conductor from South London.

Geordie Williamson reviews 'The Art of the Glimpse: 100 Irish short stories' edited by Sinéad Gleeson

The Art of the Glimpse: 100 Irish short stories

edited by Sinéad Gleeson

Apollo, £25 hb, 766 pp

You May Also Like

Leave a comment

If you are an ABR subscriber, you will need to sign in to post a comment.

If you have forgotten your sign in details, or if you receive an error message when trying to submit your comment, please email your comment (and the name of the article to which it relates) to ABR Comments. We will review your comment and, subject to approval, we will post it under your name.

Please note that all comments must be approved by ABR and comply with our Terms & Conditions.