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Sat 05 May 2007Carefully choosing her wordsClaire Keegan, whose second short story collection comes after a gap of eight years, talks about the use of English like someone would talk about mastering a difficult foreign language, writes Rosita Boland.'It takes me a long time to make those stories short." It is eight years since Claire Keegan published Antarctica, her award-winning debut collection of startlingly assured stories with pristine sentences, and characters that muscled themselves into memory and stayed there. Walk the Blue Fields, her second collection of stories, has just been published: seven stories to Antarctica's15.