City of Bohane


Book Description

'City of Bohane' is a visionary novel that blends influences from film and the graphic novel, from Trojan beats and calypso rhythms, from Celtic myth and legend, from fado and the sagas, and from all the great inheritance of Irish literature.




There Are Little Kingdoms


Book Description

From the author of City of Bohane and Dark Lies the Island, a debut collection that "could easily have been titled ‘These Are Little Masterpieces'" (The Irish Times) This award-winning story collection by Kevin Barry summons all the laughter, darkness, and intensity of contemporary Irish life. A pair of fast girls court trouble as they cool their heels on a slow night in a small town. Lonesome hillwalkers take to the high reaches in pursuit of a saving embrace. A bewildered man steps off a country bus in search of his identity—and a stiff drink. These stories, filled with a grand sense of life's absurdity, form a remarkably surefooted collection that reads like a modern-day Dubliners. Winner of the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature, and a 2007 book of the year in the Irish Times, the Sunday Tribune, and Metro, There Are Little Kingdoms marks the stunning entrance of a writer who burst onto the literary scene fully formed.




Night Boat to Tangier


Book Description

ONE OF THE NEW YORK TIMES 10 BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR • “A darkly incantatory tragicomedy of love and betrayal ... Beautifully paced, emotionally wise.” —The Boston Globe In the dark waiting room of the ferry terminal in the sketchy Spanish port of Algeciras, two aging Irishmen—Maurice Hearne and Charlie Redmond, longtime partners in the lucrative and dangerous enterprise of smuggling drugs—sit at night, none too patiently. The pair are trying to locate Maurice’s estranged daughter, Dilly, whom they’ve heard is either arriving on a boat coming from Tangier or departing on one heading there. This nocturnal vigil will initiate an extraordinary journey back in time to excavate their shared history of violence, romance, mutual betrayals, and serial exiles. Rendered with the dark humor and the hardboiled Hibernian lyricism that have made Kevin Barry one of the most striking and admired fiction writers at work today, Night Boat to Tangier is a superbly melancholic melody of a novel, full of beautiful phrases and terrible men.




Dark Lies the Island


Book Description

This is a collection of unpredictable stories about love and cruelty, crimes, desperation, and hope from the man Irvine Welsh has described as 'the most arresting and original writer to emerge from these islands in years'.




That Old Country Music


Book Description

A collection of short stories of rural Ireland in the classic Irish mode: full of love (and sex), melancholy and magic, bedecked in some of the most gorgeous prose being written today—from the author of the wildly acclaimed Night Boat to Tangier. With three novels and two short story collections published, Kevin Barry has steadily established his stature as one of the finest writers not just in Ireland but in the English language. All of his prodigious gifts of language, character, and setting in these eleven exquisite stories transport the reader to an Ireland both timeless and recognizably modern. Shot through with dark humor and the uncanny power of the primal and unchanging Irish landscape, the stories in That Old Country Music represent some of the finest fiction being written today.




Beatlebone


Book Description

WINNER OF THE GOLDSMITHS PRIZE SHORTLISTED FOR THE IRISH BOOK AWARDS 2015 He will spend three days alone on his island. That is all that he asks . . . John is so many miles from love now and home. This is the story of his strangest trip. John owns a tiny island off the west coast of Ireland. Maybe it is there that he can at last outrun the shadows of his past. The tale of a wild journey into the world and a wild journey within, Beatlebone is a mystery box of a novel. It's a portrait of an artist at a time of creative strife. It is most of all a sad and beautiful comedy from one of the most gifted stylists now at work.




Time, the City, and the Literary Imagination


Book Description

Time, the City, and the Literary Imagination explores the relationship between the constructions and representations of the relationship between time and the city in literature published between the late eighteenth century and the present. This collection offers a new way of reading the literary city by tracing the ways in which the relationship between time and urban space can shape literary narratives and forms. The essays consider the representation of a range of literary cities from across the world and consider how an understanding of time, and time passing, can impact on our understanding of the primary texts. Literature necessarily deals with time, both as a function of storytelling and as an experience of reading. In this volume, the contributions demonstrate how literature about cities brings to the forefront the relationship between individual and communal experience and time.




English as We Speak it in Ireland


Book Description




Irish Urban Fictions


Book Description

This collection is the first to examine how the city is written in modern Irish fiction. Focusing on the multi-faceted, layered, and ever-changing topography of the city in Irish writing, it brings together studies of Irish and Northern Irish fictions which contribute to a more complete picture of modern Irish literature and Irish urban cultural identities. It offers a critical introduction to the Irish city as it represented in fiction as a plural space to mirror the plurality of contemporary Irish identities north and south of the border. The chapters combine to provide a platform for new research in the field of Irish urban literary studies, including analyses of the fiction of authors including James Joyce, Roddy Doyle, Kate O’Brien, Hugo Hamilton, Kevin Barry, and Rosemary Jenkinson. An exciting and diverse range of fictions is introduced and examined with the aim of generating a cohesive perspective on Irish urban fictions and to stimulate further discussion in this emerging area.




Hidden Topographies


Book Description

This book examines dystopian fiction’s recent paradigm shift towards urban dystopias. It links the dystopian tradition with the literary history of the novel, spatio-philosophical concepts against the backdrop of the spatial turn, and systems-theory. Five dystopian novels are discussed in great detail: China Miéville’s Perdido Street Station (2000) and The City & The City (2009), City of Bohane (2011) by Kevin Barry, John Berger’s Lilac and Flag (1992), and Divided Kingdom (2005) by Rupert Thomson. The book includes chapters on the literary history of the dystopian tradition, the referential interplay of maps and literature, urban spaces in literature, borders and transgressions, and on systems-theory as a tool for charting dystopian fiction. The result is a detailed overview of how dystopian fiction constantly adapts to – and reflects on – the actual world.