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That Old Country Music
Kevin Barry
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Description for That Old Country Music
Hardcover.
SHORTLISTED FOR THE EDGE HILL SHORT STORY PRIZE 'One of the best collections you'll read this year' Sunday Times 'Wild, witty stories . . . Exhilarating' Observer Since his landmark debut collection, There Are Little Kingdoms, 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 ... Read morestyle 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. Show Less
Product Details
Publisher
Canongate Books
Place of Publication
Edinburgh, United Kingdom
Shipping Time
Usually ships in 2 to 4 working days
About Kevin Barry
Kevin Barry is the author of three novels and two other short story collections. His awards include the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, the Goldsmiths Prize, the Sunday Times EFG Short Story Award and the Lannan Foundation Literary Award. His stories and essays have appeared in the New Yorker, Granta and elsewhere. He also works as a playwright and screenwriter, and ... Read morehe lives in County Sligo, Ireland. His latest novel, Night Boat to Tangier, was an Irish number one bestseller, was longlisted for the Booker Prize and shortlisted for Novel of the Year at the Irish Book Awards. Show Less
Reviews for That Old Country Music
The master short story teller turns messy emotions into riveting tales of wounded Irish folk . . . One of the best collections you'll read this year
Sunday Times
Wild, witty stories . . . The west of Ireland teems with canny characters and vivid language . . . Darkly glimmering . . . ... Read moreTheir language is exhilarating, its verve evoking the very best of Barry's compatriots while further carving out a territory that's all his own
Observer
These are brilliant and vivid and uproarious stories. It's a rare writer who can call a tune like Kevin Barry
LISA McINERNEY Barry often writes with sonorous wisdom . . . but as readers of his grimly hilarious novels will know, his language is just as precise when it is in the service of comedy . . . Exhilaratingly funny and poignant fables
Jake Kerridge
Sunday Telegraph
These playful, serious and beautifully crafted stories allow Barry to experiment as we need great writers to do
SARAH MOSS
Irish Times
The third short-story collection from a stylist to savour brings more exhilarating, darkly witty tales of oddballs yearning after love and enchantment in the wild west of Ireland
Guardian, 50 hottest new books everyone should read
An extraordinary writer . . . In his short stories Barry seems most fully and brilliantly himself . . . Unimprovable masterpieces . . . So rich and so flawlessly crafted - its best stories feel instantly canonical, as if we've already been reading them for years . . . The opening story is letter-perfect from its first line . . . Funny, moving, built with superior economy, this is the real thing . . . Barry remains the great romantic of contemporary Irish fiction. Like all of the most interesting artists, he gets better with every risk he takes. The courage may be his. But the rewards are all ours
Kevin Power
Irish Independent
Full of the damaged characters, menacing rural scenery and darkly comic, slantwise prose that have become his trademark . . . At each turn, Barry makes his fiction a matter of life and death
New Statesman
Optimism and sorrow anchor the stories in this collection, where relationships take unexpected turns and characters befuddle one another and themselves. Barry's writing sparkles, as ever, moving speedily between pathos and humour to great effect
New York Times Book Review, Editors' Choice
Barry is wickedly funny, slyly transgressive and consistently brilliant. He is constantly turning tricks with language before upending us on the thwarted desires of his characters and the dark energy of his landscapes. And underpinning it all, the melancholy of men that is Barry's hallmark
MARY COSTELLO Beautifully pitched short stories . . . A richly comic collection from an Irish maestro . . . Barry holds myth-making and dull reality in teasing balance, with a kind of comic double vision winking at the operatic and the bathetic by turns
Guardian
Handled with such delicacy, economy and depth of feeling without sentimentality, the people of this little masterpiece - people flawed, driven and full of longing - were my companions for days after the last paragraph of the story had been read
WENDY ERSKINE
Caught by the River
Imaginative . . . Offers an original, wonderfully offbeat and insightful view into modern Ireland
Independent
There's a fluent charm in Kevin Barry's writing even when he's dealing with subjects that are far from charming . . . Barry's deceptively laid-back writing has an assured texture. He makes it look easy, but it is unmistakably deft
Sunday Times
Barry returns to what he does best - the short story. He pitches men's paltry inventories of belongings and fragile longings against landscapes rife with dangerous energies to sketch the precarious presence of the male in stories of fabulous language and sudden laugh-out-loud sentences
Kevin Gildea
Irish Times, Books of the Year
A flavoursome treat . . . Stirring tales of madness and murder, heartbreak and folly, bubbling with mischievously dark comedy . . . Throughout, the wild beauty of the Irish landscape is an expressive presence, seeping its enchantment into us just as much as into Barry's gloriously idiosyncratic creations
Daily Mail
Some of my happiest fiction-reading hours have been spent in the company of Kevin Barry . . . This collection, written over eight years, takes him deeper into his homeland, the wild places, the old country, to hear its hidden music
Spectator
Full of memorably offbeat stories and bizarre characters . . . His collection is an original, insightful window into modern Ireland
Independent, Best Books of the Year
A selection of stories written over the past eight years on Barry's inimitable weather-drenched canvas, populated by a restless and heartbroken cast made vital through his lightly dazzling sentences
Keith Duggan
Irish Times
Simmering with his trademark impatient energy and flair for dark comedy . . . There's a sense of confidence and control in all of the stories, as Barry has spent years honing his craft for striking dialogue and biting humour . . . Sharp and absorbing
Irish Examiner
[A] dark take on the romantic impulse
Financial Times
Full of the signature dark humour of an author who thrives in the short form
Irish Times, Books of the Year
The most exciting Irish short story writer of his generation
Sunday Times
Praise for Kevin Barry: The Barry turn of phrase is a true wonder of this world
MAX PORTER Barry writes with real exuberance
Sunday Times
Kevin Barry is one of the most original, daring, and seriously funny writers ever to come out of Ireland. I'd walk a hundred miles for a new Barry book and I would make the happy journey home, laughing
COLUM McCANN One of the most abundantly talented novelists writing today
Daily Telegraph
If prose were gold and diamonds there'd be thousands of hell-bent prospectors heading for the Black Hills of Kevin Barry's glistening, sparkling novel
SEBASTIAN BARRY Buoyant . . . Barry is such a deft and generous writer
New York Times
Kevin Barry is two kinds, if not three kinds, of a genius
BBC RADIO 4 Barry is a clarvoyant narrator of the male psyche and a consistent lyrical visionary
Guardian
Among the next generation of writers - Zadie Smith, Michael Chabon, Jonathan Safran Foer and so on - the one that stands above the rest for ambition, language and sheer verve is Barry . . . If you haven't heard of him yet, you soon will. I'd wager he'll wind up with the Nobel Prize for Literature before he's done
Evening Standard
One of the most gifted fiction writers to emerge from the English-speaking world in the new century
Paris Review
Reading him, I am given the feeling that I've achieved something, done something good and am being justly remunerated. The brain lights up and grins
Niall Griffiths
Spectator
Extremely talented creator, Kevin Barry, has a fine instinct for the sweet spot where the comforting familiarities of genre blend into the surprises and provocations of art
New York Times Book Review
A writer in full command of the possibilities of the form
Irish Times
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