Donn Byrne was born in New York and raised in Ulster. He was educated at Trinity College Dublin and the Sorbonne. He wrote in the tradition of the oral storyteller - economical, immediate, and rooted in the particular rhythms of Irish speech. In his lifetime he was widely read. Then the market moved on.
Changeling and Other Stories, first published in 1923 by The Century Co., collects some of Byrne's most distinctive short fiction. These are not nostalgic pieces. They are not tourist Ireland. They are stories shaped by a writer who understood that the landscape and the people of Ulster had their own gravity - something older and harder than sentiment.
The title story follows a changeling child, navigating the border between the fairy world and the human one with the matter-of-fact acceptance that defines Byrne's approach to the supernatural. In his work, the otherworldly is not decorative. It is structural.
This edition is published by Rosmerta Publishing as part of the Irish Culture Project - a series dedicated to recovering public domain works of Irish literary and cultural significance and returning them to print. The text has been freshly formatted for modern print standards. The work is exactly as Byrne wrote it.
