To The World of Men, Welcome
At the heart of this radical collection of 19 short stories is an exploration of the pain and pleasure of love, sexual love, romantic love, the love between parents and their children. The focus in these fictions is on the events that cause relationships to flounder. Nuala Ní Chonchúir is one of the most acclaimed, award-winning writers in Ireland today.
The Cocktail Hour
Sophia Hillan
The Cocktail Hour
ISBN: 9781851321940
This rewarding short fiction collection includes moving tales on the themes of sibling love and its vicissitudes. A child’s precocious contemplation of war in Ireland and war in Germany promotes a disturbance in the imaginative lonely boy. A woman’s playful New York adventure turns on a confrontation with external reality. A dramatic monologue from one of Jane Austen’s bitter relatives is directed at the famous female writer. A deceptive, subversive intelligence emerges beneath the lightness and simplicity of the stories in this dazzling volume.
These elegant sophisticated stories and a distinguished career in literary criticism and research, are further confirmation that Sophia Hillan is one of our most precious contributors to Ireland’s cultural life.
– David Park
If, like me, you are drawn to Sophia Hillan’s writing, you will be rewarded in this collection by the inclusion of an astonishing tale, folkish in its simplicity, but concentrated on the theme of several of the stories here: sibling love and its vicissitudes. A child’s precocious contemplation of war in Ireland and war in Germany promotes a disturbance in the imaginative lonely boy. A woman’s playful New York adventure turns on a confrontation with external reality. A dramatic monologue from one of Jane Austen’s bitter relatives is directed at the unpropertied female writer. A deceptive, subversive intelligence is at work here beneath the lightness. Sophia Hillan’s range is dazzling.
– Anne Devlin
In the opening story, ‘A Princeton Man’, we are borne back to an exclusive Gatsbyland, filtered in all its shallow cruelties with Jamesian clarity and irony.
– Medbh McGuckian
Impossibly Small Spaces
Lisa C. Taylor
Impossibly Small Spaces
ISBN: 9781851321780
The short story dwells within narrow corridors and, in Impossibly Small Spaces, a collection that seamlessly matches form with content, Lisa C. Taylor gifts the reader with cut-glass explorations of the diminishing spaces and of the freedoms – illusory, fleeting, elusive – so craved by a heartbreakingly real cast of characters. Wonderful. – Alan McMonagle
The stories in Impossibly Small Spaces write you into a world that is very much today’s America. Intensely lyrical, it is brimming with characters whose lives are being shaped by the strictures of their own inadequacies. As in her first collection, Lisa tackles such emotive topics as death, adoption, breast surgery and rape with subtle intensity, reminiscent of Alice Munroe or Amy Bloom. Here are stories where the characters are either physically or emotionally scarred. They don’t know who they are and spend their time trying to prove they exist, often in impossibly small spaces. She gives voice to people holding onto past hurts, who are not able to talk to one another. Here we meet a woman who is returned to the orphanage ‘like a pair of shoes that didn’t fit right’, or another who dreams an afterlife where the missing parts will find her. There are people who record their voices to establish proof of their own existence or talk to the lake … ‘because water has an enormous capacity for listening’. One of the significant things about this book is that even with such tough themes, they are not without humour or hope. Hugely perceptive, sizzling with electric images, this is top-class writing where grace and precision are brought to bear on lives that glow brightly in the reader’s mind long after the last page. – Geraldine Mills
A woman locks a man in an airplane bathroom, two brothers rewrite their past, and strangers in an airport are thrown together through tragedy. In Lisa C. Taylor’s second collection of short fiction she explores confinement and expansion, the psychic and literal distance of people who sometimes find themselves in the role of minor character in their own narrative. With both humour and angst, characters of all ages and backgrounds are continually forced to redefine their personal landscapes. – Ellen Meeropol
Empire
Mary O’Donnell writes with immense vivacity and skill. I love her work. Empire is a collection I found hard to put down once started, a book that draws the reader, with great grace and cleverness, into the shimmer of its power. – Joseph O’Connor
Mary O’Donnell has long been one of Ireland’s best writers. In the historical fictions in Empire she once again dazzles with her trademark intelligence, her precise, gorgeous prose and the empathy she employs in everything she writes. The novella and stories here are shot through with energy and attention, from the exoticism of early twentieth century Burma to an Ireland in flux. Another fine book from a masterful writer. – Nuala O’Connor, author of Becoming Belle
In Empire, these interconnected stories are filled with an effortlessly poetic confidence, bringing the reader back to an earlier Ireland with humour, insight, unexpected moments of revelation and clear contemporary resonances. – Eibhear Walshe
When Black Dogs Sing
Tanya Farrelly’s debut short fiction collection, When Black Dogs Sing, introduces us to an intriguing range of twenty-first century Irish characters. A young woman rents a room, to her boyfriend’s horror, in the home of an eccentric, bi-curious photographer; a poet attends a party at his girlfriend’s family home to discover that the invite was made with nefarious intention; a husband is outraged to discover that his wife is posing at a life drawing class; two girls break into the flat of an internet date and stumble on a dangerous secret; a stakeout ends in dire consequence when a friendship comes undone; a woman leaves home on a freezing night in the hope of gaining her partner’s attention; and in the title story a mother is haunted by her son’s disappearance.
Tanya Farrelly is the author of three books. Her first book, a collection of short fiction, When Black Dogs Sing, was published by Arlen House in 2016, longlisted for the Edge Hill Short Story Prize, and won the prestigious Kate O’Brien Award in 2017. Her two psychological thrillers, The Girl Behind the Lens and When Your Eyes Close were published by Harper Collins and both were Amazon bestsellers. She holds a PhD in Creative and Critical Writing from Bangor University, Wales, and teaches at the Irish Writers Centre and the People’s College. She has been named Writer in Residence 2021 at NUI Galway. She is also the founder and director of Bray Literary Festival. Her second short story collection Nobody Needs to Know is forthcoming from Arlen House.
Out of Order
Those seeking a singular poetic vision will be amply rewarded. Knight emerges as a highly skilled and engaging writer. – Verbal Arts
If you want your dull world turned upside down, Gomorrah is the one for you. An underground classic contender. – Evening Herald
Grimaldi’s Garden may begin with the banality of the suburbs, but it ends up somewhere decidedly more urbane. And along the way we are fed the tedium of humdrum lives. But appearances are deceptive. As we learn how precious little we know about those we think we know, the story looks at life from a different perspective; takes a glimpse beyond the obvious. – Sunday Tribune
Ms Knight is to be complimented for the daring of her experimentation and for having the courage to write about despair without herself despairing. Original and engaging, The Invisible Woman deserves to be widely read. – The Sunday Press
Growing a New Tail
Lisa C. Taylor
Growing a New Tail
ISBN: 9781851321285
The stories in Growing a New Tail will move you with their honesty and sustain you with their compassionate and fierce commitment to human resilience. Taylor’s characters are as real as your neighbours, as exasperating and complex and present as your family. Their choices are constrained, their failures temporary, and their triumphs provisional as all real victories are. Here is a writer who is nobody’s fool, especially not those who suggest that people are pitiable and renewal impossible. The writing here is exquisite, the observations nearly preternatural, the intelligence incandescent. I am grateful for this book.
– Richard Hoffman, author of Love and Fury
Growing a New Tail has me growing a new admiration for Lisa C Taylor. If you know her as an accomplished poet, you’ll join me in marvelling at how deftly she hops to prose – even incorporating some braiding of the forms – in this strong collection fittingly about reinvention. If you’ve already been lucky enough to encounter Lisa’s fiction, you’ll celebrate her first book of short stories, populated memorably by characters who must find their footing after their lives have been irreparably altered by loss or circumstance.
– Suzanne Strempek Shea, author of This is Paradise: An Irish Mother’s Grief, an African Village’s Plight and the Medical Clinic That Brought Fresh Hope to Both
The Negative Cutter
Patrick Chapman
The Negative Cutter
Isbn: 9781851320899
from Anhedonia
The social committee at Ampersand Bailey Ampersand had chosen a Wild West theme for the agency’s client Christmas party. This was now entering its third hour in a function room of the Bush Hotel, a marketing-driven venue that, according to its literature, prided itself on being luxurious and efficient. The hotel’s owners failed to understand that you could not truly be both at the same time. Tony Bright knew, because he had written the literature in question and had objected to that wording but was overruled. He imagined that she knew too – Dora Potts, a striking brunette who worked in the accounts department of the biscuit company for whom &B& created the advertising. She was out there in the crowd and he didn’t think he was in with a shout. There were too many well-adjusted cowboys between him and her.
from The Negative Cutter
Thunder fucked the sky. A sonic boom broke in the air and died away. The bedroom window rattled, distorting the face of a waxing gibbous moon that flung droplet shadows at the opposite wall. Krista was unperturbed by the sudden blast of noise. She and Raimi had not been sleeping. Now she turned over into the empty warm depression that still held his fading aftershave, a scent known as Fadó. There was another odour too, of mint and latex and the byproducts of degrading cells. Without much thought she picked the condom up from the sheet and flung it at the basket beside the TV; for the first time that night, her lover’s seed found a target. She listened to his urine sloshing into the bowl before the change of note as he ran the tap to wash his hands and the pipes set up a screech that would not die for minutes yet. Krista hated how Raimi wasted water like he had invented it.
Noir By Noir West: Dark Fiction from the West of Ireland
James Martin Joyce (ed.)
Noir By Noir West: Dark Fiction from the West of Ireland
ISBN:
9781851320776 paperback
Noir by Noir West presents new short fiction by 30 of Ireland’s best established and emerging writers, stories filled with menace and intrigue, with wit, wind and rain. From small town streets in millennium Ireland to the frontline trenches of World War 1, these stories represent a new departure in Irish literature, a collection of dark fiction from a new wave of Galway writers.
Mike McCormack
Ken Bruen
Órfhlaith Foyle
Séamus Scanlon
Geraldine Mills
Celia de Fréine
Kernan Andrews
Micheál Ó Conghaile
Gerry Galvin
Cristina Galvin
Des Kenny
James Martyn Joyce
Hugo Kelly
Aideen Henry
Alan McMonagle
Sarah Clancy
Gerard Hanberry
Aoife Casby
Susan Millar DuMars
Kevin Higgins
Alan Caden
Siobhan Shine
Conor Montague
Celeste Augé
Edward Boyne
Pat Mullan
Hedy Gibbons Lynott
John Walsh
Elizabeth Power
Aron Costello
Hellkite
Geraldine Mills
Hellkite
ISBN:
9781851321001 paperback
9781851321018 hardback
In this, her third short fiction collection, Geraldine Mills extends her thematic range to excavate new and shifting landscapes. Not afraid to tackle taboos, Hellkite occupies a space all of its own, where gender expectations are re-aligned to explore woman’s inhumanity to man. Here we meet women who inhabit the world of the hellkite, who are unfaithful to their men, who treat them with contempt, who lock them away in rooms of little ease. Within these small masterpieces, she shines a high-definition light on such cruelty to create a territory of the unspoken.
Geraldine Mills is a fiction writer of astounding verve and style. Her stories are edgy, vivid, darkly funny and at times, scarifying in a way that is almost primal. In this writer’s world, there is no such thing as ordinary life, and we are all the better for it. It is rare indeed to come across a writer whose prose is so infused with imagery and poetic nuance. At times, it’s like being inside a short movie where the reader is taken on a sometimes scary but always beautiful and captivating journey only with no guarantee of a safe arrival. I love these stories – the voice is markedly original and enthralling and there are no words wasted.
– Ferdia MacAnna