SOURCE: Grennan, Eamon. Review of The Collected Stories, by John McGahern. America 169, no. 3 (31 July 1993): 20–22.

In the following review, Grennan offers a positive assessment of The Collected Stories, complimenting the collection as “wonderfully rich.”

The voice that tells these splendid stories [in The Collected Stories]—and in so many of them it seems to be the same slightly mournful but unflinching voice—wells up out of modern Irish consciousness itself, carrying with it such central issues as displacement (often from country to city), social and spiritual rupture and chronic loss. To deal with issues of such weight, McGahern has forged a style of extraordinary fidelity to the facts, both the external facts of the phenomenal world and the internal facts of a painfully alert consciousness. In many of his stories, the experience of the narrator or central character boils down to watching and listening, his emotional life in part...