The collection ends with a distracted mother treating her husband to a bizarre broth of their missing daughter's photographs. She picks up a poor, orphaned bloke and, starry-eyed, relishes delightful hours with him before winding up handcuffed in his flat. In Claire Keegan's first titular story, 'Antarctica', a married woman travels to town, over-confident of her equality and bent on adultery. Still, here really is an exciting first book of deliberate, contemplative short stories. And he himself frothed at the mouth at Neil Jordan's debut, Night in Tunisia, which was a mistake. What the critic rarely says is that the very source of the charm of such books is also their weakness - that untutored wonder!' True, his own first stories are woeful. 'The readers of such books always tend to over-praise them. 'There is something very affecting about a young writer's first book,' he mentioned. In 1948, Seán O'Faoláin published a meticulous study of the craft of the short story in which he agonised over the many difficulties of getting it absolutely right.
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