Cheating at Canasta: Stories - Hardcover

William Trevor was born in Mitchelstown, County Cork, in 1928, and spent his childhood in provincial Ireland. He attended Trinity College, Dublin. He is a member of the Irish Academy of Letters and a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

“Magisterial...Trevor’s stories, however dark they may seem, however forlornly uncompromising, are actually significantly shaped. Trevor wants us to see the point of his narratives: he wants us to experience a small but genuine catharsis as we reach the last lines, to understand what the story is trying to say...Trevor is quite at ease with lengthy passages of time...Trevor’s method and aim are very precise....Trevor both shows and tells, in case we miss the point—something Chekhov never did. Trevor is not the Irish Chekhov....he has created a version of the short story that almost ignores the form’s hundred or so years of intricate evolution. These stories stay in the mind long after they’re finished because they’re so solid, so deliberately shaped and directed so surely toward their solemn, harsh conclusions. Perhaps there is an eighth type of short story after all: the Trevorian.”
—The New York Times Book Review

“Literature will outpace us, like the cockroaches. After all the tinkering is done, the biggering and bettering, the rebuilding and ruining, we will have only books like William Trevor’s new collection “Cheating at Canasta,” to remind us how serious, noble, painful and happy human life once was. Trevor’s stories—so like James Joyce’s and Alice Munro’s—preserve something of the scale of human life.”
—Los Angeles Times

“As a book critic, the three comments I hear most often are, ‘I don't have time to read books,’ ‘I don't like short stories,"’and ‘I only read nonfiction.’ A possible rejoinder to all three is: Have you ever read William Trevor? His stories – many of which involve adultery, guilt, and longing – are marvels of craftsmanship in which whole lives are distilled into potently concentrated essences that can be easily quaffed in a sitting...After decades at his craft, he's writing in top form, exploring misgivings and longings with subtlety and acuity.”
–Christian Science Monitor

" There are just a few reliable things in life: death, taxes, hunger and the precision of William Trevor‘s short stories. The Irish-born writer never waivers in his nuanced examinations of loneliness and the peculiar ways people find themselves connecting to each other.”
–Associated Press

“The Short Story as a form is difficult to mater and powerful in effect—like a well-strung bow. [Trevor] is unquestionably a master. Trevor’s attention has turned in this latest collection to matters of regret and loss, but the energy of erotic desire and dangerous transgressions—sin, as it once was richly understood in his native Ireland—still charges his world, running like a hot current under the surface of every human interaction.”
—O, The Oprah Magazine

“Say the name William Trevor, and that is recommendation enough for some readers....His stories are all of one piece, and a reader barely has time to marvel at a turn of phrase or choice word because everything is so tightly pitched to move the story forward. And there are marvelous lines...Trevor is known as a profound observer of human nature, sharp and insightful. There is a point in his stories, calm and mild at first, when everything changes—a revelation, lie, betrayal, accident or violence plunges the narrative straight into drama. And for the reader, it’s an astonishing feeling.”
—USA Today

“With a half-century of fiction behind him, William Trevor’s stories carry a signature of such unerring certainty that they might as well be cast in stone...However mournful in the world they portray, these stories posses an unwavering mortal center that is itself a measure of greatness.”
—Boston Globe

“In a few pages, [Trevor] evokes a lifetime of hurt, rage, and shame, mingles with unbidden sympathy and understanding, an emotional cocktail so believably complex you’ll want to sample it again and again.
—Entertainment Weekly, Grade: A

“Another stellar collection from Trevor (A Bit on the Side: Stories, 2004, etc.). Blarney-free—shorn, too, of much of anything overtly lyrical or political or Catholic Gothic—these aren't standard-issue Irish tales. Yet Trevor gives us an unassailably real contemporary Ireland, quotidian and atmospheric as fog. In "The Dressmaker's Child," Cahal the mechanic lives in a small-town world of Ford Cortinas and WD-40, and yet collides with the uncanny. Spanish pilgrims he's chauffeuring to visit the Virgin of the Wayside, a statue whose miraculous tears have been debunked, kiss in his backseat, unaware of the thud as he hits a small girl on the dark road. Guilt descends and, his crime undetected, a year later he returns to the Virgin: Her marble face is moist. "Faith," meanwhile, concerns a difficult woman named Hester, given to "severity and suspicion," whose brother's improbable solicitude during her dark dying makes the tale one of the most convincing deathbed stories since Tolstoy's "The Death of Ivan Illyich." A dim tramp, Donal Prunty, returns home in "Men of Ireland" after failure in England. He's wretched and, hoping to share his wretchedness, blackmails a guileless priest by hinting that the old man is a pedophile like so many of his clerical brethren. "Diminished by the sins that so deeply stained his cloth, distrustful of his people," Father Meade hands over money to the thief then prays for him. In the marvelous title story, old Mallory redeems a promise to his recently dead wife to return to Harry's Bar in Venice and review the Italian sights the couple had once loved. In the famous bistro, he overhears a couple, stylish as Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, bicker and pout and miscommunicate. He mourns his loss and their waste of love.

Profound.”
—Kirkus Reviews

“The greatest living writer of short stories in the English language.”
—The New Yorker