Download or read book The Holy City written by Patrick McCabe and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2011-06-01 with total page 191 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Now entering his sixty-seventh year, Chris McCool can confidently call himself a member of the Happy Club: he has an attractive and exceedingly accommodating Croatian girlfriend and has been told he bears more than a passing resemblance to Roger Moore. As he looks back on the glory days of his youth, he recalls the swinging sixties of rural Ireland: a decade in which the cool cats sang along to Lulu and drove around in Ford Cortinas, when swinging meant wearing velvet trousers and shirts with frills, and where Dolores McCausland - Dolly Mixtures to those who knew her best - danced on the tops of tables and set the pulses of every man in small-town Cullymore racing. Chris McCool had it all back then. He had the moves, he had the car, and he had Dolly, a woman who purred suggestive songs and tugged gently at her skin-tight dresses, a Protestant femme fatale who was glamorous, transgressive and who called him her very own 'Mr Wonderful'. She was, in short, the answer to this bastard son of a Catholic farmer's prayers. Except that there was another Mr Wonderful in town, a certain Marcus Otoyo - a young Nigerian with glossy curls and a dazzling devoutness that was all but irresistible. Although Chris, of course, was interested in Marcus only because of their shared religious fervour and mutual appreciation of the finer things. That was all. Besides, Mr McCool was always a hopeless romantic - some even described him as excessively so - but is there anything wrong with that? Spiked with macabre humour and disquieting revelations, The Holy City is a brilliant, disturbing and compelling novel from one of Ireland's most original contemporary writers.
Download or read book Poguemahone written by Patrick McCabe and published by Biblioasis. This book was released on 2022-05-03 with total page 667 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A swirling, psychedelic, bleakly funny fugue by the Booker-shortlisted author of The Butcher Boy and Breakfast on Pluto. Una Fogarty, suffering from dementia in a seaside nursing home, would be all alone without her brother Dan, whose epic free-verse monologue tells their family story. Exile from Ireland and immigrant life in England. Their mother’s trials as a call girl. Young Una’s search for love in a seemingly haunted hippie squat, and the two-timing Scottish stoner poet she’ll never get over. Now she sits outside in the sun as her memories unspool from Dan’s mouth and his own role in the tale grows ever stranger— and more sinister. A swirling, psychedelic, bleakly funny fugue, Patrick McCabe’s epic reinvention of the verse novel combines Modernist fragmentation and Beat spontaneity with Irish folklore, then douses it in whiskey and sets it on fire. Drinking song and punk libretto, ancient as myth and wholly original, Poguemahone is the devastating telling of one family’s history—and the forces, seen and unseen, that make their fate.
Download or read book The Butcher Boy written by Patrick McCabe and published by Pan Macmillan. This book was released on 1992 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A novel describing an Irish boy who lives with his abusive parents.
Download or read book The Stray Sod Country written by Patrick McCabe and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2011-09-05 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It is 1958, and as Laika, the Sputnik dog is launched into space, Golly Murray, the Cullymore barber's wife, finds herself oddly obsessing about the canine cosmonaut. Meanwhile, Fonsey 'Teddy' O'Neill, is returning, like the prodigal son, from overseas, with brylcream in his hair, and a Cuban-heeled swagger to his step, having experienced his coming-of-age in Butlin's, Skegness. Father Augustus Hand is working on a bold new theatrical production for Easter, which he, for one, knows will put Cullymore on the map. And, as the Manchester United football team prepare to take off from Munich airport, James A Reilly sits in his hovel by the lake outside town, with his pet fox and his father's gun, feeling the weight of an insidious and inscrutable presence pressing down upon him.From the closed terraces and back lanes of rural Ireland to the information highway and global separations of our own time, The Stray Sod Country is at once an homage to what we think we may have lost and a chilling reminder that the past has never really passed.With echoes of Peyton Place, and Fellinni's Amarcord, and with a sinister, diabolical narrator at its heart, this is at once a story of a small town - with its secrets, fears, friendships and betrayals - and a sweeping, grand guignol of theatrical extravagance from one of the finest writers of his generation.
Download or read book Patrick McCabe s Ireland written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2018-12-24 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Patrick McCabe’s Ireland offers literary scholars’ exploration of the significant fiction produced by this author from the early 1990s and 2000s.
Download or read book Emerald Germs of Ireland written by Patrick McCabe and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2010-11-23 with total page 356 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "There is something special about the relationship we all have with our mothers . . . " Meet Pat McNab, forty-five years old, and about to embark on a homicidal rampage sparked by matricide. Or is he? Pat spent endless hours chain-smoking and propping up the counter of Sullivan's Select Bar (not that Mrs. McNab knew anything about it—she and Timmy the barman didn't get along at all) or sitting on his mother's knee singing away together like some ridiculous two-headed human jukebox. But that was all before the story really began—Emerald Germs of Ireland is in essence Pat McNab's post-matricide year. Pat, who now spends many of his waking hours sitting by the window in his old dark house, watching videos and nibbling abstractedly on pieces of toast, reflects on those long-gone days with Mommy, while fending off the persistent interferences of his small-town neighbors: the puritanical Mrs. Tubridy; that irascible seller of turf, the Turf Man; Sgt. "Kojak" Foley, and other unwanted snoops who could soon come to regret their inquisitive, nose-poking ways. This is Patrick McCabe at his fiendish best. Dark, emotionally powerful, and surreal, Emerald Germs of Ireland is also his funniest work to date, masterfully displaying the anarchic twists and turns that are the hallmarks of his comic genius.
Download or read book We Won t Make It Out Alive written by Kate Walls and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2020-05-15 with total page 105 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first full length study of Patrick McCabe’s work, We Won’t Make It Out Alive, examines the mental instability and carefully constructed childhoods that McCabe has crafted for his various characters—the one eyed quasi Al Pacino, the sequin studded transvestite, the bachelor farmer who routinely exhumes his dead mother for a chat. Beneath the grotesque and often very funny narratives of Irish border town life lurks startlingly similar pasts for these characters, spanning all of McCabe’s catalogue. As children, they were subject to the cruelty of the orphanage/workhouse or deadbeat parents numbed by alcohol. Many were victims of sexual abuse by priests and witnesses to the senseless violence brought on by political divides. The outrageous personalities and later actions of these characters often overshadow these very real beginnings, and in this book, Kate Walls discusses the impact of these social problems and how McCabe’s unfortunate (and usually well-meaning) narrators are driven crazy as a result. We Won’t Make It Out Alive also discusses how these characters fare against the Troubles of the 1970s and, for the novels set in more contemporary times, the changing Ireland of the Celtic Tiger. Being on the fringes of society themselves, McCabe’s characters have a unique vantage point from which to comment on these defining moments of social upheaval.
Download or read book Call Me the Breeze written by Patrick McCabe and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2010-10-12 with total page 391 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With T. S. Eliot's words as his guide, Joey Tallon embarks on a journey toward enlightenment in the troubling psychedelic-gone-wrong atmosphere of the late 1970s. A man deranged by desire, and longing for belonging, Tallon searches for his"place of peace" -- a spiritual landscape located somewhere between his small town in Northern Ireland and Iowa ... and maybe between heaven and hell.
Download or read book Emerald Germs of Ireland written by Patrick McCabe and published by . This book was released on 2002-01 with total page 380 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Meet Pat McNab, forty five years old, often to be found puffing smokes and propping up the counter of Sullivans Select Bar or sitting on his mothers knee, both of them singing like some ridiculous two-headed human juke box. But that was all before the story really begins. Emerald Germs of Ireland is, in essence, Pat McNabs post-matricide year. This is another great romp from the master of black comedy.
Download or read book Patrick McCabe s Ireland written by Jennifer Keating and published by Brill / Rodopi. This book was released on 2019 with total page 182 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Few contemporary Irish writers have been more attuned to the historical influence of partition on Ireland's culture and literary representation than Patrick McCabe. In the recent context of Brexit, his work produced in the late nineteen nineties and early two-thousands carries considerable poignancy, especially in relation to the Catholic Church, gender roles and persistence of a history of violence in Ireland. This volume attends to three novels, The Butcher Boy, Breakfast on Plutoand Winterwoodas an emblematic representation of Ireland in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.Contributors are: K. Brisley Brennan, Aisling Cormack, Flore Coulouma, Luke Gibbons, Lindsay Haney, Barbara Hoffmann, Jennifer Keating, James F. Knapp, Colin MacCabe, Kristina Varade.
Download or read book Breakfast on Pluto written by Patrick McCabe and published by Pan Macmillan. This book was released on 2012-07-12 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: ‘Dysfunctional Ireland in all its glories is here, with humour of the blackest hue, madness and violence, hopelessly randy priests, dodgy politicians, a grand gallery of misfits culminating in McCabe’s hero in Breakfast on Pluto, Patrick “Pussy” Braden, the transvestite prostitute from the village of Tyreelin . . . Wild, hilarious, merciless and fiendishly clever’ Ronan Farren, Sunday Independent ‘He is the fortunate possessor of a savage and unfettered imagination; his books . . . dissect life’s miseries with a gleaming comedic scalpel’ Erica Wagner, The Times ‘It finds humour in places that other writers are afraid to look for it’ David Robson, Sunday Telegraph ‘This is a savagely funny and authentically tragic novel of an Ireland in unhappy transition and beneath McCabe’s perfectly delivered black comedy lies an angry heart’ GQ Magazine ‘Without drawing breath, McCabe mixes camp comedy with brutality, making Breakfast on Pluto both funny and deeply shocking’ Maxim ‘Told with irresistible zest, brio and gaiety . . . McCabe’s brilliant, startling talent is to make enchantingly dashing narratives out of the most ghastly states of mind imaginable, and to induce compassion for lives which seem least to invite it . . . He is a dark genius of incongruity and the grotesque’ Hermione Lee, Observer
Download or read book The Dead School written by Patrick McCabe and published by Pan Macmillan. This book was released on 2012-07-12 with total page 356 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Malachy Dudgeon has escaped the misery and madness of his childhood home and landed a job in the most famous school in Dublin. The headmaster, Raphael Bell, has overcome his own tragedies to forge a model career, but when Malachy Dudgeon and Raphael Bell meet, they become inextricably engaged in a macabre relationship which proves fatal to their fortunes and their sanity. ‘McCabe can make you howl at the darkest antics . . . He never sets a foot – or syllable – wrong. His novel is death on a laugh-support machine. Stupendous.’ Scotland on Sunday ‘Raphael, the great headmaster, is a marvellous creation . . . McCabe has a charm as a storyteller which is all his own’ Sunday Telegraph ‘Exhilarating. Reading the distilled gouts of consciousness which pour from the minds of these characters is like being trapped on a big dipper with articulate maniacs . . . Horribly funny’ The Times ‘An appallingly funny story . . . horribly memorable’ Times Literary Supplement
Download or read book The Big Yaroo written by Pat McCabe and published by . This book was released on 2019 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Francie Brady, the broken Butcher Boy, leads a busy life in Fizzbag Mansions. Still obsessed with the comic books of his childhood, he has found a new vocation as a publisher of his very own magazine, The Big Yaroo
Download or read book The Ballad of Lord Edward and Citizen Small written by Neil Jordan and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2023-05-02 with total page 333 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From Academy Award-winning film director Neil Jordan comes an artful reimagining of an extraordinary friendship spanning the revolutionary tumult of the eighteenth century. South Carolina, 1781: the American Revolution. An enslaved man escaping to his freedom saves the life of Lord Edward Fitzgerald, a British army officer and the younger son of one of Ireland's grandest families. The tale that unfolds is narrated by Tony Small, the formerly enslaved man who becomes Fitzgerald's companion—and best friend. While details of Lord Edward's life are well documented, little is known of Tony Small, who is at the heart of this moving novel. In this gripping narrative, his character considers the ironies of empire, captivity, and freedom, mapping Lord Edward's journey from being a loyal subject of the British Empire to becoming a leader of the disastrous Irish rebellion of 1798. This powerful new work of fiction brings Neil Jordan's inimitable storytelling ability to the revolutions that shaped the eighteenth century—in America, France, and, finally, in Ireland.
Download or read book Mondo Desperado written by Patrick McCabe and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2010-11-16 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Patrick McCabe has long been recognized as a writer of rare talent and unique voice, whose vision of the world is so distinctive that "McCabesque" has become an adjective with multiple meanings, including "exquisitely, beautifully, mad in the head!" He was a Booker Prize finalist for The Butcher Boy, which won the Irish Times Aer Lingus/Irish Literature Prize for Fiction and was made into a motion picture directed by Neil Jordan and cowritten by McCabe and Jordan. He was again a Booker Prize finalist for Breakfast on Pluto, which won the Spirit of Life Arts/Sunday Independent Irish Literature Award and was a number one international bestseller. McCabe has been described as "the lodestone of new Irish fiction" (Wall Street Journal), "a dark. genius of incongruity and the grotesque" (Sunday Observer) and "one of Ireland's finest living writers" (New York Times Book Review). The Minneapolis Star-Tribune commented on McCabe's "remarkable...ability to induce compassion for the unlikeliest people," and in Mondo Desperado: A Serial Novel, that ability and the full range of his "grotesque genius" (Marie Claire) combine to produce a brilliant, macabre' dementedly funny and surreally imagined fiction of intertwined narratives set in a small Irish town. McCabe himself has described Mondo Desperado as being "like Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio -- on drugs." In his mondo tales of the insular town of Barntrosna, McCabe assembles a distinctly Irish crew of odd and unusual inhabitants who live on and regularly cross, often unconsciously, the border between fantasy and reality. In "Hot Nights at the Go-Go Lounge," Larry Bunyan is certain his demure wife is secretly out at night with deadbeat swingers, shooting drugs and having wild sex, while in "I Ordained the Devil," the Bishop of Barntrosna confesses that his ordination of Father Packie Cooley was really an ordination of His Satanic Majesty. Another Barntrosna resident, Dr. John Joe Parkes, discovers "The Valley of the Flying Jennets," the secret place in the mountains created by his Dr. Frankenstein -- type medical ancestor where his horrible, mutated genetic failures live. In the concluding "Forbidden Love of Noreen Tiernan," Noreen escapes Barntrosna, goes to London for nursing school, finds a lesbian lover, and teams up with her to rob and terrorize London until her mother, boyfriend and parish priest bring Noreen back home. With sly wit, characteristic, brilliant blending of sadness and humor and macabre genius, Mondo Desperado is a wonderfully imagined work of fiction -- McCabe's most dazzling yet -- rom a truly original literary talent.
Download or read book Disappearing Act written by Robert Sheehan and published by Gill & Macmillan Ltd. This book was released on 2021-10-22 with total page 218 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In his debut collection of short stories, Robert Sheehan disappears into characters, challenging the complacencies of everyday experience, often from entirely unexpected angles. Informed by the author's peripatetic life, Disappearing Act reflects on the absurdity of human behaviour. Sheehan delves deep into his characters' streams of self-talk and self-imposed delusions, exploring the dark impulses that lurk below the shiny surfaces of many outwardly normal lives. Dark and provocative, the collection will stay with the reader long after the book is finished. Warning: Contains Adult Content
Download or read book Outrageous Fortune written by Joe Cleary and published by Field Day Publications. This book was released on 2007 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Did Ireland produce a more radical and ambitious literature in the straitened circumstances of the first half of the twentieth century than it has managed to do since it began to ‘modernize’ and become more affluent from the 1960s onwards? Has Irish modernism ceded place to a prevailing naturalism that seems gritty and tough-minded, but that is aesthetically conservative and politically self-thwarted? Does the fixation with ‘de Valera’s Ireland’ in recent narrative represent a necessary settling of accounts with a dark, abusive history or is it indicative of a worrying inability on the part of Irish artists and intellectuals to respond to the very different predicaments of the post-Cold War world? These are some of the questions addressed in Outrageous Fortune. Scanning literature, theatre, film and music, Joe Cleary probes the connections between capital, culture and criticism in modern Ireland. He includes readings of James Joyce and the Irish modernists, the naturalists Patrick Kavanagh, John McGahern and Edna O’Brien, and comments too on what he terms the ‘neo-naturalism’ of Marina Carr, Patrick McCabe and Martin McDonagh. He concludes with a provocative analysis of the cultural achievement of the Pogues.
