We Seldom Talk About the Past is John MacKenna's first selected collection of short stories, from a career spanning over three decades. The stories selected come from four collections of short fiction, and represent a culmination of MacKenna's work in a form of writing he has made uniquely his own. Often compared to John McGahern, and Raymond Carver, and deeply influenced by masters of the form like Chekov, MacKenna's stories focus on the quotidian truths of our lives, of the momentousness of small moments, of sexual desire and its intimate entanglement with the domestic, of deeply felt absences and social mores, and always at the heart of his work, the sense of place, often the rural, and the acute receptiveness of our lives to the places we inhabit.



JOHN MACKENNA is the author of fifteen books – novels, short-story collections, memoir, poetry and biography – and a number of radio and stage plays. He is a winner of The Irish Times, Hennessy and Cecil Day-Lewis Awards. He is also a winner of a Jacobs Radio award for his documentary series on Leonard Cohen and a Worldplay Silver Medal (New York) for his radio play The Woman at the Window (RTE Radio 1). He teaches Creative Writing at Maynooth University and at The Hedge School on the Moone.



MacKenna has a way with the passive gut-punch.



Every single story in this anthology is a love song to the Irish landscape. MacKenna's outstanding prose is as close to the great McGahern as you'll get.



"Placed together, these narratives tell a deeper story of what it means to be human...this is the art of the short story, and MacKenna is a master of his craft."