SOURCE: A review of Lantern Slides, in World Literature Today, Vol. 65, No. 2, Spring, 1991, pp. 303-4.

In the following review, Lanters provides an unfavorable assessment of Lantern Slides.

Edna O'Brien's outspokenness on the subject of women and sexuality gained her a certain notoriety in Ireland in the early 1960s, when such matters were still considered taboo. Since then, Irish writing has come a long way, although one would hardly gather as much from O'Brien's latest collection of stories. The title Lantern Slides itself is suggestive of former times, although the stories are not overtly set in the past, and the themes are familiar from O'Brien's earlier work: loneliness, madness brought on by jealousy and sexual repression, guilt over strained relations between parents and children, women coping with ending love affairs. At least half the stories, mostly set in rural villages, seem positively nostalgic for the bad old repressive days...