Mother of Sorrows » (Reprint)

Richard McCann’s work has appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, Esquire, Tin House, and Ploughshares, and in many anthologies, including Best American Essays 2000. He is the author of Ghost Letters, a book of poems. He has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, and from the Fulbright and Rockefeller Foundations. He lives in Washington, D.C., where he co-directs the graduate program in creative writing at American University.

In these ten interwoven stories, two adolescent brothers face a world in which their father has suddenly died, a world dominated by their beautiful and complicated mother. Thirty years later, one of the brothers–the only remaining survivor of a family he seeks both to leave behind and to preserve in words forever–narrates these precise and heartbreaking tales. Suffused with the beauty of Richard McCann’s extraordinary language, Mother of Sorrows introduces us to an elegant writer like no other in contemporary fiction.

The New York Times - Mark Kamine

McCann's pointillist approach his stories tend to accumulate incidents rather than depict sustained events has surprising momentum, and together the stories acquire a rare thematic richness. Thus the perfectly engineered payoff to ''My Brother in the Basement,'' in which the narrator's hidden sexuality is contrasted with his brother's tormented openness, reverberates in the next and final story, ''The Universe, Concealed,'' about the narrator's ostensibly invisible illness.