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INTRODUCTION
by Sean O'Faolain
This is a highly original, personal, distinctive and interesting book. What more can one ask of any book except that it should be written by a man who also has the gift of words, images, feelings, responsiveness? Neil Jordan shows all these qualities. If he keeps and develops his primal gifts — he is quite young; barely 25 when this first collection of stories appeared — he will become an outstanding writer. At present he is intensely concerned with things of the mind and spirit rather than vwth the social world in which most of us spend most of our busy lives, but he is also tremendously responsive to all the things, people, surroundings and influences that have affected him as a youth — which is precisely how one would also describe the relationship of Joyce to his world in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. A further cause for special interest in Neil Jordan is that while being thus engrossed in his locale he is in no way, as Joyce also was not, in the least bit parochial or regionalist. In fact, surprisingly and delightfully, the hero of the central story of this group of stories is