Mary Lavin was born in Massachusetts in 1912 but moved to Ireland as a child. Her first collection of short stories, Tales from Bective Bridge, published in 1942, was awarded the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and launched her acclaimed career in this genre. Her stories appeared in The New Yorker and Atlantic Monthly, among other magazines. Her novels, including The House in Clewe Street, were also widely celebrated. She won several awards, including the Guggenheim fellowship and the Katherine Mansfield Prize, and she was President of the Irish PEN and Aosdána, the Irish Academy of Letters. She died in 1996.
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ONE OF THE NEW YORKER'S BEST BOOKS OF 2026 SO FAR
Praise for An Arrow in Flight
"Sharp, meticulous, painful, and sometimes funny, the stories both rise above their time and place and transport us there." —The New Yorker "The Best Books of 2026 So Far"
“Lavin is the most restrained of writers, yet such restraint may be that of a person—most often a woman— in unbearable distress , just about managing not to scream… At her best, Mary Lavin is a timeless master.”—John Banville, Times Literary Supplement
"Quiet genius...brilliant...evocative but ambiguous, sensuous with a note of unease...wonderfully unpredictable...Lavin’s particular talent is for revealing the shameful, suppressed parts of her characters — and still showing them to be worthy of our attention and our pity...Lavin’s voice is one that echoes today. It’s time we listened to it." —The Times (UK)
"An Arrow in Flight is both an excellent introduction and a reminder of Lavin’s authority over the short story form. Her work resists sentimentality and spectacle, favouring instead a clear-eyed attention to how people behave when no one is watching. In an age where attention is constantly pulled in competing directions, the short story feels like a particularly apt form, and Lavin remains one of its surest practitioners. Mary Lavin’s stories have waited patiently, and the moment has finally caught up with Mary Lavin." —The Irish Examiner
"Magnificent…Many of the well-crafted tales feel ahead of their time. This acute and uncompromising collection is a gift.” —Kirkus, Starred Review
"Many of the well-crafted tales feel ahead of their time. This acute and uncompromising collection is a gift."—Publishers Weekly, Starred Review
"Excellent...sympathetic, but unsentimental."—The Daily Mail
“Tóibín’s sensitive selection of Lavin’s stories for a new readership is full of memorably complex relations between parents and grown children, husbands and wives, and women friends. A feast of quiet humour and heartbreak."—Emma Donoghue
“Mary Lavin’s stories are patient, knowing, richly discriminating and wonderfully memorable. They're important work."—Richard Ford
“This is a wonderful collection, and a reminder that Mary Lavin was —is—one of Ireland's greatest writers.”—Roddy Doyle
“Mary Lavin's stories conjure sadness, profundity, hilarity and wildness out of thin air. They are simply masterful.”—Colin Barrett
“Although Lavin’s stories were mostly set in Dublin or in County Meath, they did not deal in predictable local color. And although they were mainly set in the 1940s and 1950s, they have not dated. But neither are they timeless. They belong fiercely to their own moment and emerge from a vision that is exact and precise, deceptively gentle, and then sharp and direct.”—Colm Tóibín, from the introduction to An Arrow in Flight
Praise for Mary Lavin
“She is, to come right out with it, magnificent.”—The New York Times
“A master of the genre.”—The Los Angeles Times
“A writer whose best ranks with the century’s best.”—The New York Times Book Review
“A real storyteller.”—The Atlantic
“A serious and talented writer.”—The New Yorker
“An exponent of the art of the short story in its best form.”—The Guardian
“Comparisons have been made—and rightly—with both Turgenev and Chekhov; but it was of Edith Wharton that a rereading put me in mind— in the delicacy of Miss Lavin’s sensibilities, in the robustness of her plotting, and in her insight into loneliness and the cruelties which are perpetrated in the name of family love and respectability.”—Daily Telegraph
“One of modern Irish fiction’s most subversive voices.”—The Irish Times
“I envy the skill of Mary Lavin […] Her style is bare and direct, her dialogue artfully flat. But in her capacity to make much out of little, to compress an entire ethos into an apparently banal situation, she reminds us—far more than the erectors of post-Flaubertian pyramids—what literature is about.”—Anthony Burgess
“She fascinates me more than any other of the Irish writers of my generation.”—Frank O’Connor
“A writer of high distinction, who can search deep into the crazes and conflicts of ordinary life, and light it up so that we remember and ponder her vision of it.”—Kate O’Brien
“The short story of today owes [Lavin] a great deal.”—William Trevor
“One of the finest short story writers of the twentieth century.”—Joyce Carol Oates
“Lavin’s stories restore my faith in human beings.”—Kay Boyle
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