Oxford Bookworms Library: Stage 5: Treading on Dreams: Stories from Ireland

Oxford Bookworms Library, 2008. — 103 pages. Irish writers have long been famous for short stories and there is a rich variety in this volume. On the windswept west coast of Ireland a boy and his grandmother welcome a stranger; in a Dublin bar two men discuss a woman. A mother struggles to live with the pain of a child’s death; a failed musician drowns his sorrows in whiskey in New York. Then there is the fisherman who caught no fish; a small boy who gets cross with his father; and a girl with long black hair, cycling down the mountain road to her first party, with hope in her heart. And the wish in all their hearts might be, in the words of the poet W. B. Yeats, ‘Tread softly because you tread on my dreams’. Contents: Note on the language. Mr Sing My Heart’s Delight - Brian Friel. Irish Revel - Edna O’Brien. The Third Party - William Trevor. Delivery - Lorcan Byrne. My Oedipus Complex - Frank O’Connor. Men and Women - Claire Keegan. Lord McDonald - Eamonn Sweeney. A Fishy Story - Somerville & Ross. Glossary. Activities. About the Authors. 'At home we started with an innocent life. Walking home from village dances across pale wet fields, looking at birds on the moonlit lake, playing a tune across the water in the early morning with no other sound in the clear cold air.' Innocence and experience, loss and longing, humour and sadness run hand in hand through these stories. The stories in this volume of World Stories are by Irish writers Brian Friel, Edna O'Brien, William Trevor, Lorcan Byrne, Frank O'Connor, Claire Keegan, Eamonn Sweeney, and Somerville & Ross. "Seven-stage graded readers series offering over 200 adapted and original English texts for secondary and adult students."