No Harm Done [Paperback]

A collection of fifteen stories, Jean McGarry???sNo Harm Done, depicts family life at its worst, best, and funniest, as if the author had conjoined the lunacy ofCold Comfort Farmwith 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.

McGarry's thickly layered prose, with its stunning emotional accuracies, is always just on the verge of exploding into dream or fantasy. ???Short stories dominated by postwar Irish-American families and marked by an entertainingly strange sensibility???McGarry at her best pushes the envelope just past realism in a way that can be comic, creepy, and poignant??????- Kirkus Review McGarry's prose is fresh, her plots unpredictable, and her dialogue shimmeringly wry... Reading McGarry's stories is to be surprised and delighted. -Alice Munro meets Edward Albee in the short story mode.
-Jean McGarry's short stories have appeared inThe New Yorker,The Yale Review,Chicago Review,The Southwest Review, and other publications
-Awards and honors include the University of Michigan Fiction Prize; Bread Loaf Fellowship; National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship; Southern Review, Louisiana State University Short Fiction Prize; and a Pushcart Prize
Ms. McGarry's stories have the feel of paintingslc"