Excursions in the Real World: Memoirs - Softcover

A true master of fiction, a writer the New Yorker has called "probably the greatest living writer of short stories in the English language," brings his considerable gifts to non-fiction in this brilliant collection of essays. Marked with Trevor's deft irony and subtle gifts for illuminating characters, Excursions in the Real World collects more than two dozen deeply personal memoirs of the artistic life.

ographical tales are about people and places, personal fascinations and enthusiasms, that have remained snagged in William Trevor's memory over the years.

He writes here of childhood and youth, of his schools and university days, his early life in Dublin and London, of Ireland and of England. Most of the portraits are of people who have either been well known to him or casually met a few are drawn from the imagination, though the subjects are real. Some of the landscapes are equally familiar to him, while others are merely glimpsed: Persia in the early seventies, a Swiss valley, County Cork in the thirties, a Gloucestershire village, Venice in November, New York and San Francisco.

"Places do not die as people do," William Trevor writes in his introduction, "but they often changed so fundamentally that little is left of what once they were. The landscape of the Nire valley that spreads over a northern part of Country Waterford is timeless, but the Dublin reme