{"title":"Jean Mcgarry","description":null,"products":[{"product_id":"courage-of-girls-book-jean-mcgarry-9780813517711","title":"The Courage of Girls","description":null,"brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50337918091537,"sku":"CIN0813517710VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0813517710.jpg?v=1751138940"},{"product_id":"dream-date-book-jean-mcgarry-9780801869372","title":"Dream Date","description":"Jean McGarry has been praised for her \"deft, comic, and devastatingly precise portraits\" ( New York Times Book Review) and as \"a writer who honors the human condition\" ( Baltimore Sun). In her new collection of stories,  Dream Date, she focuses her skills as a \"gifted observer\" ( Publishers Weekly) on the delicate boundary that separates the real from the ethereal states we drift into and out of as we try to make sense of our relationships, romantic and otherwise, with the other sex. Funny and haunting in equal measure-and suffused with a hint of the surreal-McGarry's stories explore the confusions, contradictions, and calamities of the modern relationship: in \"Paris,\" a woman tracks down her wayward husband in the City of Lights and ends up having a meeting of minds with his mistress that gives great satisfaction to both women; in \"Moon, June,\" a woman stalks the wardrobe of a wealthy socialite in a consignment shop, opening up a world of polymorphous delight and fashion envy; and in \"The Secret of His Sleep,\" a man wakes up after forty years to a reality that is at once strangely familiar and completely unexpected. In these wry fictions, real-world problems often have solutions fashioned with the stunning clarity and logic of a dream.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50363377975569,"sku":"CIN0801869374G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0801869374.jpg?v=1751075935"},{"product_id":"blue-boy-book-jean-mcgarry-9781737513407","title":"Blue Boy","description":"\u003cp\u003eBlue Boy tells the story of an art historian with gargantuan ambition and hubris. A greedy tyrant, Gabriel Rhab regards most of the people around him, family and colleagues included, as existing to serve him, though, unfortunately, they have their own ambitions and appetites, which sometimes get in the way. Though a satire, the story offers both fun and empathy, as the intensely inward-gazing world of academic rivalry, the sadness of art history, the futility of theory, and the ludic aspects of domestic life are explored from various points of view with hard intelligence and psychological depth. \u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51050211967249,"sku":"NIN9781737513407","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52613950996753,"sku":"NLS9781737513407","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1737513404.jpg?v=1751215776"},{"product_id":"no-harm-done-book-jean-mcgarry-9781943150076","title":"No Harm Done","description":"A collection of fifteen stories, Jean McGarry’s No Harm Done, depicts family life at its worst, best, and funniest, as if the author had conjoined the lunacy of Cold Comfort Farm with the bitter grievances of Dubliners. As the author writes in “Strong Boy,” this might be “…because every family, rich or poor, is roughage.”    The characters, gallant, goofy, gifted, and grim, include sickly mothers of a dozen children, boozy fathers with a gift of the gab, kids aspiring to be nuns and priests, or just to get out of town with a whole skin.    A section is devoted to one marriage made in heaven: a Jewish psychoanalyst devoted to his ex-nun wife. Another set of stories reworks familiar fairy tales, setting them in the wild present. No Harm Done (whose title is Irish code for wishful thinking) concludes with a truce to the war between the sexes, and indeed a `solution’ to the tragicomedy that is marriage and family.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ -","offer_id":51056930193681,"sku":"","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51056932847889,"sku":"NIN9781943150076","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52347668922641,"sku":"NLS9781943150076","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1943150079.jpg?v=1751220058"},{"product_id":"airs-of-providence-book-jean-mcgarry-9780801863677","title":"Airs of Providence","description":"Providence -- a city named in the hope that a direct compliment to God might place Him under some sort of obligation to its inhabitants -- provides Jean McGarry with the fertile ground of her comic and gritty, harsh and touching cycle of stories. Weaving in and out of Airs of Providence is o novella telling the story of April and Margery Flanaghan, two sisters trying to grow up in this neighborhood and doing only a so-so job of it. And it is a job, in a world not clearly made for anyone, but better suited to an older generation. Surrounded by nuns and priests, uncles and aunts, biddies and oddballs, April and Margery do their best to be normal. They practice their penmanship, babysit, go to o prom, and try to be up to date. But how even to look normal in a world where you are always running up against uncontrollable mood swings, mysterious infirmities, unexplained sorrows? Over a period of thirty-five years, they sniff out neighborhood scandals, get an \"earful\" of what the others are up to, and rest secure behind their sets of double curtains in the knowledge that everything human and frail is on the outside, everything blameless and perfect on the inside. If the Airs of Providence are sometimes rough, they are always funny. They may be sad too, but it is a dry-eyed melancholy that is no relation -- or perhaps just a poor relation -- to the air of \"Danny Boy\".","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ -","offer_id":51137471349009,"sku":"","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51137474232593,"sku":"NIN9780801863677","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52139036475665,"sku":"NLS9780801863677","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0801863678.jpg?v=1751296661"},{"product_id":"home-at-last-book-jean-mcgarry-9780801848537","title":"Home at Last","description":"Home is the unnamed goal in this collection whose characters are somehow always searching for that ideal state of calm and warmth and perfect tolerance. Of course, that dream is quite unlike the hard world of Providence, where these dreamers really live - a world of wary neighbours and vague priests, of flinty teachers, of parents distant and irascible. Hungering for some better place, these sons and daughters of New England follow very different paths, and make very different - often shattering - discoveries.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":52530397643025,"sku":null,"price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52530398494993,"sku":"NLS9780801848537","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/9780801848537.jpg?v=1760652559"}],"url":"https:\/\/www.worldofbooks.com\/collections\/author-books-by-jean-mcgarry.oembed","provider":"World of Books ","version":"1.0","type":"link"}