BEN FORKNER recently retired as Professor of English at the University of Angers in France where he founded the Journal of the Short Story thirty years ago. He has written many essays on writers from Ireland and the American South, and has edited a dozen anthologies and a new edition of John James Audubon's journals. His afterword, 'The Long Way Round', for this selection of Benedict Kiely's stories was first presented as a talk at the Benedict Kiely Literary Weekend in Omagh in 2008.