Death of a Chieftain

Long renowned as one of Ireland's greatest poets, John Montague, Ireland Professor of Poetry, displays his second gift, as a writer of fine short stories, in this superb collection.These nine stories extend from Northern Ireland to Dublin, and even, in the daring title story, to Mexico. They focus on such compelling and diverse themes as the conspiracy of sadism between schoolmaster and schoolchildren; the fantasy world of a lonely farm boy; political scheming in a city office; the struggles of a gifted artist in bohemian Dublin. "The Cry," an astonishingly prescient story, is one of the first to describe the beginnings of the Troubles, and "An Occasion of Sin," written in the voice of a young French woman confronting Irish attitudes towards sex, is a small masterpiece. But it is the title story which dazzles most of all. Anticipating magic realism, this tour de force describes the astonishing Bernard Corunna Coote and his Mexican campaign to establish that the Irish founded America!John Montague's Death of a Chieftain and Other Stories is undoubtedly one of the most important collections of short stories to emerge from an Irish writer in the twentieth century.