That Old Country Music
Stories
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- 10,99 $
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- 10,99 $
Description de l’éditeur
ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY LIBRARY JOURNAL
From the author of the wildly acclaimed Night Boat to Tangier, a New York Times "Top 10" book of 2019, here are stories of contemporary Ireland: full of love (and sex), melancholy and magic, bedecked in some of the most gorgeous prose being written today.
Since his landmark debut collection There Are Little Kingdoms in 2007, and its award-winning sequel in 2012, Dark Lies the Island, Kevin Barry has been acclaimed as one of the world’s most accomplished and gifted short story writers.
Barry’s lyric intensity, the vitality of his comedy and the darkness of his vision recall the work of masters of the genre like Flannery O’Connor and William Trevor, but he has forged a style which is patently his own.
In this rapturous third collection, we encounter a ragbag of West of Ireland characters, many on the cusp between love and catastrophe, heartbreak and epiphany, resignation and hope. These stories show an Ireland in a condition of great flux but also as a place where older rhythms, and an older magic, somehow persist.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Irish writer Barry follows Night Boat to Tangier with a rather mixed story collection. "The Coast of Leitrim" and "Deer Season" tread well-worn romantic territories, depicting doomed and all-too familiar relationships. "Who's-Dead McCarthy," about a morbid townie chatterbox, is entertaining, yet it ends with a punch line that falls flat. On the other hand, the title story, which follows a pregnant teen as she waits for her criminal fianc to return from a robbery, pulses with electricity and emotion, despite its abrupt conclusion. "Toronto and the State of Grace" showcases the author's gift for dialogue and wit, as a brash son and his elderly mother hold court in a sleepy pub, drinking their way through the pub's liquor and showering the barkeep with stories. And "Roma Kid" transforms what initially seems to be a depressing runaway child story into a fairy tale of finding family and purpose. As always, Barry can't write a bad sentence ("A light rain began to fall and it spoke more than anything else of the place through which she moved"), but the too-tepid stories don't do justice to the author's considerable talents. This won't go down as one of Barry's finer works.
