Frank O'Connor (the pseudonym of Michael O'Donovan) wrote some of the finest short fiction of this century. Although now only some of his two hundred stories are well-known, during his lifetime he had an international audience who agreed with William Butler Yeats that "O'Connor is doing for Ireland what Chekhov did for Russia." Collections of his stories appeared regularly; he published in the The New Yorker and Harper's Bazaar, and his work was translated into Danish and German. His poignant, sensitive fiction shows him to be an enthralled student of human behavior, one who could say, "I can't imagine anything better in the world than people."

Lyrical and realistic, his fiction offers a detailed examination--whether amused, rueful, or angry--of a middle-class Catholic world. He focuses on those moments of rending stress when essential character is revealed ("An iron bar must have been bent and been seen to be...