In the 30 years since O'Brien's acclaimed debut with The Country Girls, the regular production of her 17 subsequent volumes has fueled the predictable response that she is predictable. The core of her fiction does indeed work over the idea of a woman, usually Irish, embittered by society, usually Irish. But in the dozen stories here the author is wholly more interesting than the popular press's regular association of her with scandalous sexual candor. All narrators here are women, some characters and some omniscient. All combine well-studied weariness with refreshing toughness. The best of these stories compress multiple narratives into a sequence of cutting vignettes. The first, ``Oft in the Stilly Night,'' charts various denizens of a village, and the last, the title story, mixes images from a single party.
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