With An Arrow In Flight, one of the great overlooked voices of modern Irish literature, Mary Lavin’s stories fiction is now being revived for a new generation of readers in this definitive volume, selected and introduced by Colm Tóibín.
In This Spotlight On An Arrow In Flight
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About An Arrow In Flight
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.
Praise for An Arrow In Flight
“…Lavin is especially gifted at exploring missed and mangled connections between lonely people, and at showing the ways women in patriarchal midcentury Ireland mount subtle but stout resistance to the master plots of marriage and gender expectations….Subtle, poignant stories from a writer who deserves to be remembered—and read.”—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
In 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
In An Arrow In Flight, “Mary Lavin’s stories are patient, knowing, richly discriminating and wonderfully memorable. They’re important work.”—Richard Ford
Praise for Mary Lavin
“She is, to come right out with it, magnificent”—The New York Times
“A master of the genre.”—The Los Angeles Times
“A writer whose best ranks with the century’s best.”—The New York Times Book Review
“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
“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
“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
“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
“She fascinates me more than any other of the Irish writers of my generation”—Frank O’Connor
“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
About Mary Lavin, Author of An Arrow In Flight
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.
You can learn more about Mary Lavin on Wikipedia.
Source: Publisher
Publisher: Scribner | Simon & Schuster
ISBN Trade Paperback 9781668098714
Pub Date Mar 3, 2026
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