An Arrow in Flight - by Mary Lavin (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

One of the great overlooked voices of modern Irish literature, once hailed as "magnificent" by The New York Times, Mary Lavin's fiction is now being revived for a new generation of readers in this definitive volume, selected and introduced by Colm Tóibín.

During her lifetime, Irish American writer Mary Lavin was a prominent literary figure. Throughout the 1940s, '50s, and '60s, her stories were frequently featured in The New Yorker, compared to the works of Chekhov, James, and Wharton, and celebrated in major publications, ranging from The New York Times to The Irish Times. Lavin won prestigious awards, such as the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and the Katherine Mansfield Prize, and her influence extends to many of today's great fiction writers. Yet, despite her incredible success, Lavin's once acclaimed body of work has largely fallen out of print, lost and erased from the canon.

Now, An Arrow in Flight brings together sixteen of Lavin's most powerful stories, selected and introduced by Colm Tóibín. In witty and sharp prose, these tales explore familial tensions, relationships between men and women, and the social mores and biases of 20th-century Irish society, from the streets of Dublin to the fields of County Meath. Essential for any fan of contemporary Irish literature, An Arrow in Flight shines a much-needed light on "a master of the genre" (Los Angeles Times) who has, for too long, remained in the shadows.

Review Quotes

Praise for An Arrow in Flight

"Mary Lavin's stories conjure sadness, profundity, hilarity and wildness out of thin air. They are simply masterful."
--Colin Barrett, Booker-longlisted author of Wild Houses

Praise for Mary Lavin

"I envy the skill of Mary Lavin [...] Her style is bare and direct, her dialogue artfully flat. But in her capacity to make much out of little, to compress an entire ethos into an apparently banal situation, she reminds us--far more than the erectors of post-Flaubertian pyramids--what literature is about." --Anthony Burgess

"She is, to come right out with it, magnificent"
--New York Times

"Comparisons have been made - and rightly - with both Turgenev and Chekhov; but it was of Edith Wharton that a rereading put me in mind - in the delicacy of Miss Lavin's sensibilities, in the robustness of her plotting, and in her insight into loneliness and the cruelties which are perpetrated in the name of family love and respectability."
--Daily Telegraph

"A writer whose best ranks with the century's best."
--New York Times Book Review

"She fascinates me more than any other of the Irish writers of my generation" --Frank O'Connor

"Mary Lavin's stories are a delight. They are delicate, but not too delicate to carry tragedy on one shoulder and comedy on the other."
--Sunday Times

"Miss Lavin, to its credit and, I am sure, her satisfaction, is to be regularly encountered in the pages of the New Yorker, but her genius - and I can use no other word - is not best set off by those costly surroundings. She is not to be pursued through columns and around corners, knocking up against advertisements for Hawai'ian hotels or transparent slumberwear. You must meet Miss Lavin in a book."
--Irish Times

"[Her stories] speak to us from a far, green world - a world whose freshness we have desperate need of at this time .... Mary Lavin has given us in these stories an entire country, and surely there is no greater gift a writer can make."
--Kay Boyle

"A master of the genre."
--LA Times

"Mary Lavin looks right into the hearts of men and women, and every now and then into that of Mother Nature, and of course tells a story too, but it is not so much the story you notice, while reading her, as the gradual revealing of characters until they stand before the reader shining and clear and transparent [...] Mary Lavin has more in common with the wide rural spaces and introspection of the Russians of the last century than she has with the other writers of her time. She is not all rural any more than the Brontes were, but like them she is a product of the countryside"
--Lord Dunsany

"No one writing in Ireland today can penetrate more unerringly to the very essence of individual Irish character than Mary Lavin [...] Lavin does not seek to charm or beguile her readers. Her only interest is to use the short story to illuminate life, to capture significant moments in the experience of her characters that will expose them in all their pitiful nakedness of mind and spirit and send cold chills down her readers' spines [...] There are moments in reading "Selected Stories" when one is fleetingly reminded of Katherine Mansfield. At least once I found myself making an admiring comparison to Edith Wharton at her best."
--New York Times

"She is, in a sense, to the Irish short story what Kate O'Brien was to the Irish novel. They both probe and celebrate the hidden intensities of women trapped in a stiflingly provincial society and they both combine a remarkable command of passion with a telling eye for mundane but highly effective detail."
--TLS

"Although this slender volume is Mary Lavin's first book, the short stories it contains represent the writings of a master craftsman, who shows every sign of becoming one of the most distinguished Irish writers of our generation. They have a vividness, a mastery of dialogue and imagery, and a gripping power which makes it impossible to set a story down once it has been begun. They have, in fact, a haunting quality, which remains long after any commonplace short story has been forgotten."
--Irish Times

"A writer of high distinction, who can search deep into the crazes and conflicts of ordinary life, and light it up so that we remember and ponder her vision of it."
--Kate O'Brien, The Spectator

"One of modern Irish fiction's most subversive voices." --The Irish Times

"One of the finest short story writers of the twentieth century."
--Joyce Carol Oates

"Mary Lavin's stories have always given me a feeling of wonder and security - security because of the way the view keeps opening up, with such ease and authority, and wonder because she is, after all, so intrepid, so original and astonishing."
--Alice Munro

About the Author

Mary Lavin was born in Massachusetts in 1912 but moved to Ireland as a child. Her first collection of short stories, Tales from Bective Bridge, published in 1942, was awarded the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and launched her acclaimed career in this genre. Her stories appeared in The New Yorker and Atlantic Monthly, among other magazines. Her novels, including The House in Clewe Street, were also widely celebrated. She won several awards, including the Guggenheim fellowship and the Katherine Mansfield Prize, and she was President of the Irish PEN and Aosdána, the Irish Academy of Letters. She died in 1996.

Colm Tóibín is the author of eleven novels, including Long Island, an Oprah's Book Club Pick; The Magician, winner of The Writers' Prize; The Master, winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize; Brooklyn, winner of the Costa Book Award; and Nora Webster, as well as two story collections and several books of criticism. He is the Irene and Sidney B. Silverman Professor of the Humanities at Columbia University and was named the 2022-2024 Laureate for Irish Fiction by the Arts Council of Ireland. He was shortlisted three times for the Booker Prize. He was also awarded the Bodley Medal, the Würth Prize for European Literature, and the Prix Femina spécial for his body of work.