A few years back, I edited two anthologies of short stories by women, and later a hundred strong collection of Irish stories. These books took a very long time because, if you’re going to do it properly, you need to read a lot. Cumulatively, for the three books, my conservative guess is that I read about 6,000 stories. It might even be more. I’ve been reading and buying anthologies for years. Not just Irish ones: Japanese, Brazilian, African volumes. Ghost stories. Translated fiction. LGBTQI collections. I can’t pass one in a bookshop. They are an obsession of sorts, but I’ve sworn off (editing) them for the foreseeable. Because they take a very long time it's only now that Hagstone – a book started about 12 years ago – is finally about to be published. There’s the act of buying books, ordering collections from the library, filling out the three-books-per-hour-max in the National Library - and that’s without the actual reading itself. But there is another reason: a persistent, nigglin…
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