"Dermot Healy wrote intricate and innovative short stories that, along with works by Neil Jordan and Desmond Hogan, relaunched the Irish short story tradition. Set in small-town Ireland and the equally suffocating confines of the Irish expat communities of 1970s London, Healy's stories show compassion toward the marginalized and the dispossessed. Gathering all of Healy's stories together for the first time, this collection includes the long prose-drama "Before the Off" and Healy's final short works, "Along the Lines" and "Images" --.