[In The Collected Stories of Sean O'Faolain there 90 stories] written between 1927 and 1982. None has been written or retouched. As [Sean] once explained: "You can rewrite while you are the same man. To rewrite years after is a form of forgery." Bravely, he resists the urge to forge and I, rereading him, am back in his head—or rather in the heads of a series of Seans, the youngest of whom I never knew. It is an odd but exhilarating experience because his best stories are as good as you'll find in anyone's canon—so good they spark off that glee which comes when art triumphs over intractable material: meaning, of course, life.

Life was very intractable indeed during the Irish Troubles and Sean, writing in 1927, was still stunned by its shifts. Unsurprisingly, he wavered beween mythifying and demystifying: an electric mix. His diction was romantic and relied, as...