Literary fantasyfan Vote • December 2013

[Bookpossum]

Oh dear, I don't think I have any at all - my ancestors are very English on both sides as far back as I know, which is several generations. However, there are lots of people with Irish ancestry in Australia, so I have the flavour of it, as in the US.

And let's face it, the English are a splendidly mongrel bunch!

[Billi]

Originally Posted by issybird

Three of my great-grandparents were born in the Auld Sod. Do I win?

If noone else will beat you with four great-grandparents, yes!

[Bookworm_Girl]

I have 2 great-grandparents with Irish ancestry.

Great selections, fantasyfan! It was a tough choice to vote. I look forward to this month's winner.

[sun surfer]

It seems our little club has a bit of Irish in it!

The nominations were great and I had a very hard time of it deciding which to vote for. It took me a few days of back and forth and finally I just said to heck with it and voted for almost everything.

[Bookpossum]

Looks as if it might be a tie between O'Brien and O'Connor!

[paola]

should anyone manage to make the trip, the kindle edition is quite cheap on amazon.it:
http://www.amazon.it/My-Oedipus-Comp...+other+stories

My Oedipus Complex and Other Stories by Frank O’Connor does not appear to be available as an ebook at Amazon in the US, nor at Kobo. However, this book—The Best of Frank O'Connor—is available for $13.99 at Kobo, B&N and $11.84 at Amazon.

[issybird]

Query, perhaps fantasyfan can help, but I'm sure I can work it out.

I went to the library this morning to get Collected Stories by Frank O'Connor, as I didn't see an entry for My Oedipus Complex. I have the following list of stories from that: "The Genius", "My Oedipus Complex", "The Study of History", "First Confession", "The Duke's Children", "First Love", "The Ugly Duckling", "The Bridal Night" and "The Miser". (If that's not the complete list, I hope someone will supply the missing titles.)

In checking Collected Stories, however, it seems to be missing "The Genius," "The Duke's Children" and "The Miser." In his introduction, Richard Ellison says some stories were renamed, but doesn't say which ones. So my first question is whether any of these three were renamed.

On looking into it, I see there is a collection called The Stories of Frank O'Connor with the same publication date (1952) as My Oedipus Complex and containing the title story. I assume that it was renamed for the American market to spare our tender sensibilities. The library also has that and I can go back if the three missing stories aren't in Collected Stories.

Why can't books just have one title? /rant

While I was in the library, I picked up a couple of other books from this list. I rather regretted At Swim-Two-Birds when I saw on the cover the following quote from Dylan Thomas:

This is just the book to give your sister if she's a loud, dirty, boozy girl!

ETA:I hadn't seen Hamlet53's post when I posted. For the Americans, the collection called The Stories of Frank O'Connor is the one we want. And not Stories by Frank O'Connor (1956), either.

[issybird]

.....

[Bookworm_Girl]

Looking forward to reading this selection! I went with Hamlet53's recommendation of The Best of Frank O'Connor from the Amazon Kindle Store. Thank you! It was edited by Julian Barnes with input from his widow, Harriet O'Donovan Sheehy. I like the way it's organized into categories such as war, childhood, writers, Ireland, abroad, "last things" and several more. It also has a chronology and explanation of Irish historical events at the beginning which appeals to my research tendencies.

[sun surfer]

The discussion thread is now up.

Here is the list of stories from "My Oedipus Complex and Other Stories":

The Genius
My Oedipus Complex
First Confession
The Study of History
The Man of the World
Guests of the Nation
Machine-Gun Corps in action
Soirée Chez une Belle Jeune Fille
Jumbo's Wife
The Cornet-Player Who Betrayed Ireland
There is a Lone House
News for the Church
The Mad Lomasneys
Uprooted
The Majesty of the Law
The Luceys
After Fourteen Years
Peasants
The Bridal Night
A Thing of Nothing
Michael's Wife
A Bachelor's Story
Fish for Friday
A Story by Maupassant
In the Train
The Corkerys
Old-Age Pensioners
The Long Road to Ummera
The Wreath
The Mass Island

Unfortunately, it doesn't seem at first glance like it is the same book as "The Stories of Frank O'Connor", but I can't tell for certain. I can't find a complete list online of the stories in that collection, but Wikipedia claims it includes five new stories - "My Oedipus Complex", "My Da", "The Pretender", "First Love" and "Freedom". Of those, only one title matches with the list of titles in our monthly selection. Perhaps titles have changed though, but with 4/5 titles needing to have changed chances grow dimmer that it's the same book, although a glimmer of hope is that the two books do seem to be about the same length.

I also took a look at "The Best of Frank O'Connor" ebook and at first glance it seems a much longer and more complete work, at over 700 pages. Unfortunately, once I began to compare story titles, it seems less than half of our monthly selection stories are available in it (unless there are title changes).

If one is OK with paper anyway, there are used copies of My Oedipus Complex and Other Stories going for about $5 on Amazon U.S. ($1 plus $4 shipping). Otherwise, though one may not be able to read the entire collection from other different collections, it seems like one may be able to at least read a portion of them that way.

[sun surfer]

Hmm, actually I appear to have made a mistake! My apologies. I'm not sure what I was looking at the first time, but I went back to look at "The Best of Frank O'Connor" and found a different list, and this one seems to include every short story from our monthly selection except for "The Corkerys" (and that one could have been re-named). They are, of course, in a different order and mixed in with others in this book, but they're almost all there, so for people wanting to buy an ebook in the U.S., Hamlet53's recommendation of "The Best of Frank O'Connor" seems a great choice.


ETA - I found my mistake. The first time, I looked at "Collected Stories" of Frank O'Connor, also over 700 pages, which is the one that seems to only contain about half of our monthly selection's stories, and confused it with "The Best of Frank O'Connor".

[issybird]

Thank you, sun surfer, that's a huge help.

Collected Stories has 21 of these titles, which is plenty to be going on with and I'll let the library go until next weekend.

[issybird]

Originally Posted by sun surfer

Hmm, actually I appear to have made a mistake! My apologies. I'm not sure what I was looking at the first time, but I went back to look at "The Best of Frank O'Connor" and found a different list, and this one seems to include every short story from our monthly selection except for "The Corkerys" (and that one could have been re-named). They are, of course, in a different order and mixed in with others in this book, but they're almost all there, so for people wanting to buy an ebook in the U.S., Hamlet53's recommendation of "The Best of Frank O'Connor" seems a great choice.


ETA - I found my mistake. The first time, I looked at "Collected Stories" of Frank O'Connor, also over 700 pages, which is the one that seems to only contain about half of our monthly selection's stories, and confused it with "The Best of Frank O'Connor".

Back to the drawing board!

[fantasyfan]

Perhaps this might help.

My Oedipus Complex and Other Stories is indeed a selection taken from The Stories of Frank O'Connor first published in 1953 by Hamish Hamilton. The included stories in MOP are as follows:
The Genius
My Oedipus complex
The Study of History
First Confession
The Duke's Children
First Love
The Ugly Duckling
Don Juan's Temptation
The Bridal Night
A Salesman's Romance
In the Train
Pity
The Majesty of the Law
The Paragon
Song Without Words
Uprooted
The Miser
The Cheapjack

MOC is available for Kindle at amazon.com {which I assumed was the US provider} at:

http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_no...+other+stories

I found the Kobo edition here:

http://store.kobobooks.com/en-ie/Sea...+other+Stories

If you have an apple device it is also purchasable in the iTunes store.

Here's a link to ABE which would save you money:

http://www.abebooks.com/servlet/Sear...+other+Stories

Finally, one can get a brand-new copy delivered world-wide postage free from The Book Depository at this link:

http://www.bookdepository.co.uk/My-O...ctCurrency=USD