"In 'The Joke' a middle-aged man sits listening to his wife's conversation on the phone, at once bitter and sweetly yearning, in 'The Cocktail Hour' a couple wander the night haunted, seemingly lost in a reverie of the jazz age and the movies; in 'Matters of Life and Death' two young brothers spend the night at the house of the local doctor and his wife, and together the four of them end up in a late-night dance... In this collection, his first for Faber and Faber, David Marcus has brought together some of Ireland's best-loved writers with previously unpublished authors. From Ireland itself to the United States, from rural Peru to the mountains of the Himalayas, these stories demonstrate the complexity of emotion and memory that characterise the very finest short stories, and bear testimony to the fact that it is an art form still very much alive and flourishing"--BOOK JACKET.