BEING out of the country last Monday evening, I necessarily missed the launch of The Stranger and Other Stories - the other stories being the eleven runners up in the Fish National Short Story Competition.
This was the brain child of Clement Cairns, from Durrus in West Cork, who organised the competition without outside sponsors, but who yet managed to enlist Roddy Doyle, Dermot Healy and Deirdre Madden as judges and to award first prize of £1,000 to Molly McCloskey and £100 to each of the others.
For next year's competition, he says, he's hoping for an official sponsor, but so far he's certainly done very well on his own - the book, selling at £5.99 under the Fish Publishing imprint, is well printed and laid out, and most of the stories are worth reading. The winning story, by American born, Sligo based Molly McCloskey, is especially fine.
The book is notable, too, for the detailed and generous introduction by Roddy Doyle, who sets down his reaction to each of the twelve stories (he thinks Molly McCloskey's "marvellous") and tells of his love for the short story form:
"Carver, Richard Ford, Flannery O'Connor, William Trevor - their short stories are all on my bookshelf. I love them; I read them again and again. Many of the novels that fill the spaces between them are dreadful. So why don't I write short stories?
"Because I can't. I've tried but I can't write them. There'll never be a collection of Roddy Doyle's short stories. I'll never write poetry and I'll never play for Ireland ... I could say that I don't write short stories because I couldn't be bothered writing short stories. But really, I'd love to write short stories but I can't. It's as simple as that."
Since his schooldays, he says, he had "always dreamed about being a writer but it was novels that I was writing in my dreams". Well, he has fulfilled those dreams rather well, so I think he can safely leave the short story form to the likes of Molly McCloskey and the others in this book.
Vive la difference. After last week's column, in which I ventured the opinion that the Booker Prize is generally won by very boring books, I received a letter from Mary G. Johnson in Tralee, who informed me that she not alone finished Oscar and Lucinda and The Remains of the Day, but positively enjoyed them. Mary is obviously made of sterner stuff than I am, though she did add that she was vexed and defeated by both Possession and The Famished Road.
In another letter, Mary McKeogh from Kilkenny is living proof that, contrary to what I declared, someone can actually get beyond the first five pages of Keri Hulme's The Bone People. She read it, she says, with huge enjoyment, and assures me that I should try it again. Perhaps I will, Mary, just as soon as I get round to finishing that 1,000 page EL sub committee report on the procedures and standards of gasket making.
BOOK bargains are becoming more attractive by the week. In the bargain basement of Eason at the moment you can get the extremely handsome American hardback edition of Philip Larkin's Letters for £5.95, which is a steal by anyone's standards. And I'm informed that the book of Joyce photographs about which I was enthusing some weeks back has had its price dropped from a generous £9.95 to a laughable £2.95.
LET the buyer beware. Pat Nolan from Longford alerts me to an advertisement which appeared in the Sunday Times before Christmas inviting entrants to a poetry competition organised by the International Society of Poets.
I have before me the application form, which offers the assurance that there are "no entry fees, no subsidy payments and no purchase of any kind required to enter and win the contest". That's fine, but those who do not win prizes may wish "to guarantee publication" by purchasing copies of the edition "in which their poem will appear". In other words, you pay your money and they'll publish your poem.
And how much will this cost you? You can order your "deluxe hardback edition" for a mere £44.95, though if you want your "biographical profile" included as well, it will cost you an additional £20. This is called vanity publishing, but it seems to me to be a high price to pay for vanity.