The paperback is available for purchase in most good bookshops throughout the country. Online prices and off-the-shelf prices are the same.

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.

The book featured on RTE1's The View episode of March 13. The panel was poet and broadcaster Theo Dorgan, Catherine Anne Cullen, and Katie Verling. Here's a link to the episode.

"I think Kevin Barry is the real thing . . . These are truths about ourselves and about the new Ireland." - poet Theo Durgan on RTE1's The View

You can also listen to an interview with Kevin's on RTE Radio One's The Eleventh Hour of April 25, 2007.

Thanks to RTE's Lyric FM for making available the recording of Artszone from Saturday 19, 2007.. Kevin reads the story Last Days Of The Buffalo. It's an 18MB file so you may need a broadband connection. Choose the mp3 or ogg format.

Reviews to date

For some reason, his writing style resonates personally with me. Besides perceptive, his prose is exquisite and highly visual, and the pages teem with human wildlife, briefly captured sentiment and sidelong glance.   - Marc Goldin

Limerick-born author 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

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

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

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 Milkwood about a fictional Welsh town . . . like the omniscient narrator of Milkwood - [Barry's] sitting somewhere high up, looking down at the town waking up, the bowsies, the terraces, the lovers, the ghosts . . .   - Bridget Hourican

. . . 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.

Kevin Barry was born in Limerick in 1969 and now lives in Dublin. He writes sketches and columns for the Sunday Herald in Glasgow and the Irish Examiner in Cork. He has written about travel and literature for The Guardian, The Irish Times, The Sydney Morning Herald and many other publications. His fiction has appeared in The Dublin Review, The Stinging Fly, Phoenix Best Irish Stories 2001 (ed. David Marcus), These Are Our Lives (ed. Declan Meade) and in a number of periodicals in the United States, including the The Adirondack Review and The Subterranean Review. In 2004, he was shortlisted for the Davy Byrnes Irish Writing Award. This is his first collection of stories.

 

The Stinging Fly Press gratefully acknowledges the financial support of the Arts Council/An Chomhairle Ealaíon in the publication of this title.