From William Trevor

William Trevor has been referred to by one critic as the "Chekhov of our generation."  I'm not qualified to judge this evaluation, but I can say that Trevor's writing is deceptively simple, profound, and allusive.  There seems to be a world of meaning behind each word and each sentence.  All of history is brought to bear on each moment of the story. So the stories are very dense with possibility and with reference.  I include two examples below.

from "Of the Cloth" 
in the Collection The Hill Bachelors
William Trevor

[referring to Ireland] They loved it in different ways: unspoken in the dark, that was another intimation. For Grattan there was history's tale, regrets and sorrows and distress, the voices of unconquered men, the spirit of women as proud as empresses. For Grattan there were the rivers he knew, the mountains he had never climbed, wild fuchsia by a seashore and the swallows that came back, turf smoke on the air of little towns, the quiet in long glens. The sound, the look, the shape of Ireland, and Ireland's rain and Ireland's sunshine, and Ireland's living and Ireland's dead: all that.

****

He had paid Con Tonan what he could; he'd been glad of his company. He had never thought of Con Tonan in his garden as a task he'd been given, as a single tendril of the vine to make his own. But the priest had come this evening to say that it had been so, and by saying it had found a solace for himself. Small gestures mattered now, and statements in the dark were a way to keep the faith, as monks had kept it in an Ireland that was different too.