There Are Little Kingdoms by Kevin Barry
There Are Little Kingdoms by Kevin Barry
Stories by Kevin Barry
Paperback: €9.99 (free worldwide P+P)
Fast girls cool their heels on a slow night in a small town; a bewildered man steps off a country bus in search of his identity; lonesome hillwalkers take to the high reaches in search of a saving embrace.
These are just three of the scenarios played out in Kevin Barry's wonderfully imagined and riotously entertaining stories. Throw in a lust-deranged poultry farmer, a gigantic taxi driver stricken with chilling visions, a jaded air hostess and a stressed-out genie, and you have a stunning, provocative and richly comic collection from a writer of unique gifts.
There Are Little Kingdoms chronicles life in the towns and cities of a changing land, where a strange new music sounds, where there are many uncertainties and absurdities, but where still there's laughter in the dark - it echoes as compassion.
This is a place where everything is changing, and where everything remains the same.
The Author
Kevin Barry was born in Limerick in 1969. There Are Little Kingdom is his first collection of short stories and was awarded The Rooney prize in 2007. His debut novel, City of Bohane, was published in 2011 and has been optioned for film by Parallel Productions. His second collection of short stories, Dark Lies The Island (Jonathan Cape) was published in April 2012, and contains the stories 'Fjord of Killary', which appeared in The New Yorker, and 'Beer Trip to Llandudno', which won the 2012 Sunday Times EFG Short Story Award. He lives in Sligo.
Reviews:
"Kevin Barry has produced a collection of vibrant, original, and intelligent short stories, and a number of the tales contained in There Are Little Kingdoms deserve to be read and reread, and to outlast the strange years that made them."
-Philip Ó Ceallaigh, The Irish Times
"Kevin Barry is among the brightest and most delightful new voices in Irish fiction."
-Rick Moody
“Kevin Barry's immensely entertaining debut collection of stories is filled with compelling characters, each of them fleshed out by his pungent power of description.”
-Elizabeth McGuane, The Sunday Business Post
“In the opening story - 'Atlantic City' - the languid atmosphere of a sultry summer night in a non-descript midlands town is perfectly evoked. Barry's dialogue here is suitably sure-footed and he demonstrates a deft hand in capturing the unrealised aspirations of his characters: 'The summer night' he writes, 'announced itself, with its own starlit energies. It brought temptation, yearning and ache, because these are summer things.' If this is the closest Barry comes to approximating a latter day John McGahern, elsewhere his rural landscapes have more in common with the riotous, serrated world of Martin McDonagh in which adultery, lust and alcoholism are rife. In the memorably dark 'Animal Needs', the author carefully straddles the line between comedy and tragedy . . . at his best Barry casts a caustic, quirky and offbeat eye over modern rural Ireland.”
-Daragh Reddin, Metro
“Barry has some marvellous phrases: 'Marie he decided, was just too good-looking for him: he wouldn't have a hope in hell. Teresa, on the other hand, was at the back of the line when chins were handed out, and she had the eyes of a crow. Surely this might play to his advantage?' He is also gifted in evoking place, in his sly humour, in catching atmosphere and in reducing humans down to their landscape, not allowing them to swell and dominate as they usually do in literature. The text There Are Little Kingdoms most resembles is Dylan Thomas' Under Milk Wood about a fictional Welsh town . . . like the omniscient narrator of Milk Wood - [Barry's] sitting somewhere high up, looking down at the town waking up, the bowsies, the terraces, the lovers, the ghosts . . .”
-Bridget Hourican, The Dubliner
“A brilliant collection of short pieces which showcases both the fine poetry of Barry's language and the deep-seated humanity of his comic ramblings. The characteristic milieu is a small Irish town, usually in the midlands, its denizens scratching out quietly desperate lives as they wait unknowingly for the coming economic boom. Barry understands these micro-societies: he clearly sees their petty-mindedness, jealousy, violence, chicanery, alcoholism and endless nights of hanging around. But he still finds goodness in all possible places, while also presenting these grimy dramas in some of the most beautiful and lyrical writing ever composed by an Irish writer. The results are worth 10 Marina Carr plays of a hundred Pure Mules. There are truly great things here. Expect more.”
-Irish Examiner