Download or read book STINGING FLY STORIES written by and published by . This book was released on 2018 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Pond written by Claire-Louise Bennett and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2016-07-12 with total page 210 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “A sharp, funny, and eccentric debut … Pond makes the case for Bennett as an innovative writer of real talent. … [It]reminds us that small things have great depths.”–New York Times Book Review "Dazzling…exquisitely written and daring ." –O, the Oprah Magazine Immediately upon its publication in Ireland, Claire-Louise Bennett’s debut began to attract attention well beyond the expectations of the tiny Irish press that published it. A deceptively slender volume, it captures with utterly mesmerizing virtuosity the interior reality of its unnamed protagonist, a young woman living a singular and mostly solitary existence on the outskirts of a small coastal village. Sidestepping the usual conventions of narrative, it focuses on the details of her daily experience—from the best way to eat porridge or bananas to an encounter with cows—rendered sometimes in story-length, story-like stretches of narrative, sometimes in fragments no longer than a page, but always suffused with the hypersaturated, almost synesthetic intensity of the physical world that we remember from childhood. The effect is of character refracted and ventriloquized by environment, catching as it bounces her longings, frustrations, and disappointments—the ending of an affair, or the ambivalent beginning with a new lover. As the narrator’s persona emerges in all its eccentricity, sometimes painfully and often hilariously, we cannot help but see mirrored there our own fraught desires and limitations, and our own fugitive desire, despite everything, to be known. Shimmering and unusual, Pond demands to be devoured in a single sitting that will linger long after the last page.

Download or read book The Springs of Affection written by Maeve Brennan and published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. This book was released on 1998-11 with total page 374 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Stories of Dublin.

Download or read book Young Skins written by Colin Barrett and published by Open Road + Grove/Atlantic. This book was released on 2015-03-03 with total page 160 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A blockbuster collection from one of Ireland’s most exciting young voices: “Sharp and lively . . . a rough, charged, and surprisingly fun read” (Interview). A National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 Honoree * Winner of the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award * Winner of the Guardian First Book Award * Winner of the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature Enter the small, rural town of Glanbeigh, a place whose fate took a downturn with the Celtic Tiger, a desolate spot where buffoonery and tension simmer and erupt, and booze-sodden boredom fills the corners of every pub and nightclub. Here, and in the towns beyond, the young live hard and wear the scars. Amongst them, there’s jilted Jimmy, whose best friend Tug is the terror of the town and Jimmy’s sole company in his search for the missing Clancy kid; Bat, a lovesick soul with a face like “a bowl of mashed up spuds” even before Nubbin Tansey’s boot kicked it in; and Arm, a young and desperate criminal whose destiny is shaped when he and his partner, Dympna, fail to carry out a job. In each story, a local voice delineates the grittiness of post boom Irish society. These are unforgettable characters rendered through silence, humor, and violence. “Lyrical and tough and smart . . . What seems to be about sorrow and foreboding turns into an adventure, instead, in the tender art of the unexpected.” —Anne Enright, Man Booker Prize Award–winning author “Sometimes comic, sometimes melancholy, Young Skins touches the heart, as well as the mind.” —Irish American Post

Download or read book Sweet Home written by Wendy Erskine and published by Pan Macmillan. This book was released on 2019-06-27 with total page 193 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'A gripping, wonderfully understated book that oozes humanity, emotion and humour.' Guardian Winner of the 2020 Butler Literary Award Shortlisted for the Edge Hill Prize 2019 Shortlisted for the Republic of Consciousness Prize 2019 Longlisted for the Gordon Burn Prize and the Sunday Times Audible Short Story Award 2019 ‘Wendy Erskine’s first collection, Sweet Home . . . is every bit as good as her early stories in the always astute Stinging Fly magazine promised.’ Jon McGregor, New Statesman Set in the author’s native Belfast, the ten stories in Sweet Home lay bare the heartbreak and quiet tragedies that run under the surface of everyday lives. A lonely woman is fascinated by her niqab-wearing neighbours; a middle-aged teacher becomes obsessed with a young Gaelic football player; and an employer covers for his two employees caught having sex in a public toilet. Wendy Erskine offers perfectly formed, brilliantly observed portraits of people trying to carve out a life for themselves, all the while being buffeted by the loss, grief and regret that come their way. Warm, compassionate and funny, Sweet Home captures life in contemporary East Belfast, in all of its forms. A Book of the Year in the Guardian, The White Review, Observer, New Statesman, TLS.

Download or read book Acts of Desperation written by Megan Nolan and published by Little, Brown. This book was released on 2021-03-09 with total page 247 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This "blistering anti-romance" (Catherine Lacey) paints a riveting, cathartic story about love addiction and what it does to us. Wouldn’t I do anything to reverse my loss, the absence of him? In the first scene of this provocative gut-punch of a novel, our unnamed narrator meets a magnetic writer named Ciaran and falls, against her better judgment, completely in his power. After a brief, all-consuming romance he abruptly rejects her, sending her into a tailspin of jealous obsession and longing. If he ever comes back to her, she resolves to hang onto him and his love at all costs, even if it destroys her… Part breathless confession, part lucid critique, Acts of Desperation renders a consciousness split between rebellion and submission, between escaping degradation and eroticizing it, between loving and being lovable. With unsettling, electric precision, Nolan dissects one of life’s most elusive mysteries: Why do we want what we want, and how do we want it? Heralding the arrival of a stunning new literary talent, Acts of Desperation interrogates the nature of fantasy, desire, and power, challenging us to reckon honestly with our own insatiability. "Hot as viscera." —The New Republic

Download or read book Dance Move written by Wendy Erskine and published by Picador. This book was released on 2023-02-09 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'One of the greats' - Lucy Caldwell 'Comic brilliance' - Sinéad Gleeson 'Ingenious' - The Irish Times 'Daring, funny, heartbreaking' - Observer Following the prize-winning Sweet Home, Wendy Erskine's Belfast is once again illuminated. Meet Drew Lord Haig, called on to sing an obscure hit from his youth at a paramilitary event. Meet Max as he recalls an eventful journey to a Christian film festival. And Mrs Dallesandro who dreams of being a teenager again as she sits in a tanning salon on her wedding anniversary. In these stories, Erskine's characters' wishes and hopes often fall short of their grasp. Brilliantly drawn, Dance Move is about the hugeness of life as seen through glimpses of the everyday. 'A masterpiece' - David Keenan 'Wendy Erskine's debut, Sweet Home, was pitch perfect . . . Dance Move is equally brilliant' - The Daily Mail 'Erskine's stories open slight, but they contain more than it seems possible for short stories to contain' - Keith Ridgway As Read on BBC Radio 4 Shortlisted for the Edge Hill Prize Shortlisted for the An Post Irish Book Awards Short Story of the Year

Download or read book Show Them a Good Time written by Nicole Flattery and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2020-01-28 with total page 207 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Show Them a Good Time is a master class in the short story-bold, irreverent and agonizingly funny." Sally Rooney, Author of Normal People and Conversations with Friends Show Them a Good Time tells the stories of women slotted away into restrictive roles: the celebrity's girlfriend, the widower's second wife, the lecherous professor's student, the corporate employee. But these women are too intelligent, too ferociously mordant and painfully funny to remain in their places. In "Not the End Yet,” Flattery probes the hilarious and wrenching ambivalence of Internet dating as the apocalypse nears; in "Sweet Talk,” the mysterious disappearance of local women sets the scene for a young girl to confront the dangerous uncertainties of her own sexuality; in "Abortion, A Love Story,” two college students in a dystopian campus reconfigure the perilous stories of their bodies in a fraught academic culture to offer a subversive play that takes over their own offstage lives. Together, the stories in Show Them a Good Time provide a riveting, hilarious introduction to one of today's most original young writers.

Download or read book Being Various written by Various and published by Faber & Faber. This book was released on 2019-05-02 with total page 349 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Featuring brand new short stories from Kevin Barry, Eimear McBride, Belinda McKeon, Lisa McInerney, Danielle McLaughlin, Stuart Neville, Sally Rooney, Kit de Waal and many more.Ireland is going through a golden age of writing: that has never been more apparent. I wanted to capture something of the energy of this explosion, in all its variousness... Following her own acclaimed short-story collection, Multitudes, Lucy Caldwell guest-edits the sixth volume of Faber's long-running series of all new Irish short stories, continuing the work of the late David Marcus and subsequent guest editors, Joseph O'Connor, Kevin Barry and Deirdre Madden.

Download or read book Penny Baps written by Kevin Doherty and published by JM Originals. This book was released on 2021-06-10 with total page 218 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'He won't tell Dan about the trees yet. In the spring maybe, when he knows if they're living or dead. Cahir is the right man for a secret. The great secrets of the world are best kept by fat boys and girls. Fat boys like Cahir with no shortage of capacity or cover or practice, the ones who've been hoarding for years, building heft in the quiet when backs were turned.' Cahir and Dan grew up on Inishowen, in north Donegal. It is their last year at home together. When his brother leaves, Cahir will be left behind, but he has plans too. Cahir plants trees outside the town, on a scrap of ground belonging to their mother. In a world full of badness, he wants to do something good. It is a secret, even from Dan. Dan works full time at the supermarket, content where he is. He has taken a year out before university and is messaging Lydia. If it works out with her, he might stay longer. But the land doesn't belong to Cahir or to Dan. It has been sold to Lydia's brother and when Lydia finds Cahir tending the trees, on ground that isn't his, things spiral out of Cahir's control, threatening everything he has worked for.

Download or read book The China Factory written by Mary Costello and published by Canongate Books. This book was released on 2015-05-21 with total page 166 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An elderly schoolteacher recalls the single act of youthful passion that changed her life forever. A young gardener has an unsettling encounter with a suburban housewife. A teenage girl strikes up an unlikely friendship with a lonely bachelor. In these twelve haunting stories award-winning writer Mary Costello examines the passions and perils of everyday life with startling insight, casting a light into the darkest corners of the human heart.

Download or read book We Don t Know What We re Doing written by Thomas Morris and published by . This book was released on 2016-06-02 with total page 267 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book The Quiet Whispers Never Stop written by Olivia Fitzsimons and published by Hachette UK. This book was released on 2022-04-14 with total page 339 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: AN IRISH EXAMINER BOOK OF THE YEAR SHORTLISTED FOR THE BUTLER LITERARY AWARD SHORTLISTED FOR THE KATE O'BRIEN AWARD 'Touching and darkly beautiful' Irish Sunday Independent 'Powerful, uncompromising' Irish Times 'Utterly absorbing, a novel that keeps you guessing right to the end' Kit de Waal 1982. Northern Ireland. Nuala Malin is tied to a life she doesn't want by her daughter Sam and baby son PJ. An affair with a seventeen-year-old boy reminds her of a future she hasn't given up on, but it can't last, and when her chance to leave comes, she takes it. 1994. If Sam Malin has a god then it is Kurt Cobain. Music is the only thing that brings her peace. She wants a life away from the North and its troubles, away from her da who can't talk about the past but seems stuck there, waiting for Sam's mother to return. A mother Sam barely knew. Escape seems out of reach until Sam meets a jagged, magnetic older man, drawn to him in a way she can't yet comprehend. She falls for him, unable to say no. Sam is more like her mother than she knows.

Download or read book Keeping the House written by Tice Cin and published by . This book was released on 2021-09-07 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From a bewitching new voice, a story of a young woman coming into her own

Download or read book Last Ones Left Alive written by Sarah Davis-Goff and published by Flatiron Books. This book was released on 2019-08-27 with total page 183 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Combines the spare poetry of The Road with the dizzying pace of 28 Days Later.” —Jennie Melamed, author Gather the Daughters “A riveting novel.” —Eowyn Ivey, bestselling author of The Snow Child Remember your just-in-cases. Beware tall buildings. Always have your knives. Raised in isolation by her mother and Maeve on a small island off the coast of a post-apocalyptic Ireland, Orpen’s life has revolved around training to fight a threat she’s never seen. More and more she feels the call of the mainland, and the prospect of finding other survivors. But that is where danger lies, too, in the form of the flesh-eating menace known as the skrake. Then disaster strikes. Alone, pushing an unconscious Maeve in a wheelbarrow, Orpen decides her last hope is abandoning the safety of the island and journeying across the country to reach the legendary banshees, the rumored all-female fighting force that battles the skrake. But the skrake are not the only threat... Sarah Davis-Goff's Last Ones Left Alive is a brilliantly original imagining of a young woman's journey to discover her true identity.

Download or read book Modern Times written by CATHY. SWEENEY and published by . This book was released on 2021-06-24 with total page 160 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: There once was ... a woman who loved her husband's cock so much that she began taking it to work in her lunchbox. a man who made films without a camera, which transfixed his estranged daughter. a couple who administered electric shocks to each other, to be reminded of what love is. a world where you wake up one day and notice that, one by one, people are turning blue Startling, wry, beguiling and emotionally charged - the stories in Modern Times might be reminiscent of Lydia Davis, Angela Carter and Daisy Johnson, but they are also unlike anything you've read before.

Download or read book Catchlights written by Niamh Prior and published by JM Originals. This book was released on 2022-06-09 with total page 185 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'Each story is a perfectly formed jewel . . . vivid characterization, ingenious plotting and intelligent structuring amount to a most engaging read as we put the jigsaw of these lives back together' LIZ NUGENT An Irish vagrant with a strange ability wanders Kew Gardens. She knows that the fine weather is going to break and the impending rain casts her mind back to a riverbank where a shady fisherman once asked for her help. The same fisherman, years later, runs into a childhood friend and becomes intrigued by his wife. She in turn is charmed by his boldness and his confidence. One day she goes out for a walk and never returns. In another time, in another place, a photographer notices two ghostly figures - of a man and a woman - on pictures developed from his vintage lens. The images become clearer with each roll of film, but his dogged investigation of the mystery could cost him dearly. So spool out the lives in Catchlights: the past contains the present and future; shallow and deep acts of cruelty, love, selfishness and kindness reverberate for years.