The Benefits of Tobacco

A collection of short stories by Irish author Shane Harrison. The fourteen stories are set, for the most part, in contemporary Ireland, but also range as far as the Yukon Territory of gold rush days, to Paris and the Mediterranean. Other landscapes of the heart and mind are here too as the characters in these tales - mechanics, librarian, artists, lovers and losers - grapple with the persistent themes of the human condition, with love and death, desire and despair. Author and critic Leo Cullen drew comparisons with Borges, hailing the black humour of the writing. "Here are stories told with style and assurance. Here is a writer who can hold his nerve, and ours." Meanwhile, poet and Irish Times critic David Wheatley wrote: "Shane Harrison's stories combine the guilty pleasures of a rained-on bohemianism and the long, slow burn of illumination. Who needs a smoking ban with benefits like these?"