We Seldom Talk About the Past: Selected Short Stories

We Seldom Talk About the Past is John MacKenna’s first selected collection of short stories, from a career spanning over three decades. The stories selected come from four collections of short fiction, and represent a culmination of MacKenna’s work in a form of writing he has made uniquely his own. Often compared to John McGahern, and Raymond Carver, and deeply influenced by masters of the form like Chekov, MacKenna’s stories focus on the quotidian truths of our lives, of the momentousness of small moments, of sexual desire and its intimate entanglement with the domestic, of deeply felt absences and social mores, and always at the heart of his work, the sense of place, often the rural, and the acute receptiveness of our lives to the places we inhabit.