Лучшие книги Кевина Барри

Гангстерская трагикомедия, полная мрачного юмора и лиризма. 23 октября 2018 года. Сонный порт Альхесирас, ревущие воды Гибралтара, дождливая испанская Андалусия. Двое мужчин лет пятидесяти, слегка побитые жизнью, раздают редким пассажирам и встречающим листовки. Наших друзей зовут Морис Хирн (высокий и худощавый) и Чарли Редмонд (полный и коренастый), и они ирландские гангстеры, когда-то выстроившие огромную наркоимперию, но лишившиеся ее годами позже. Они оказались в Альхесирасе не случайно, слухи донесли до Мориса радостную весть: именно сегодня, 23 октября, на пароходе, следующем в Танжер или обратно, будет его дочь Дилли, пропавшая…

2053 рік, постапокаліптична Західна Ірландія. Логан Гартнетт, харизматичний лідер банди Стиляг, править містом Боуган уже не перший десяток років — і збирається правити ще бодай стільки ж. Але постають певні проблеми: його давній суперник повертається до міста після довгого вигнання, у злиденних панельках на півночі починає вимахувати кулаками банда-конкурент, та й власні підлеглі снують інтриги. Чи вдасться йому втримати владу або хоч голову на плечах? І чи є майбутнє в залюбленого у втрачене минуле міста Боуган, поділеного між кількома кланами?

From the author of City of Bohane, a debut collection that “could easily have been titled ‘These Are Little Masterpieces’” (The Irish Times)

This award-winning story collection by Kevin Barry summons all the laughter, darkness, and intensity of contemporary Irish life. A pair of fast girls court trouble as they cool their heels on a slow night in a small town. Lonesome hill walkers take to the high reaches in pursuit of a saving embrace. A bewildered man steps off a country bus in search of his identity—and a stiff drink. These stories, filled with a grand sense of life’s absurdity, form a remarkably sure-footed collection that reads like a modern-day Dubliners. The winner of the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature and a 2007 book of the year in The Irish Times, the Sunday Tribune, and Metro, There Are Little Kingdoms marks the stunning entrance of a writer who burst onto the literary scene fully formed.

Award-winning writer Kevin Barry’s first novel set in America, a savagely funny and achingly romantic tale of young lovers on the lam in 1890s Montana.

October 1891. A hard winter approaches across the Rocky Mountains. The city of Butte, Montana is rich on copper mines and rampant with vice and debauchery among a hard-living crowd of immigrant Irish workers. Here we find Tom Rourke, a young poet and ballad-maker of the town, but also a doper, a drinker, and a fearsome degenerate. Just as he feels his life is heading nowhere fast, Polly Gillespie arrives in town as the new bride of the extremely devout mine captain Long Anthony Harrington. A thunderbolt love affair takes spark between Tom and Polly and they strike out west on a stolen horse, moving through the badlands of Montana and Idaho, and briefly an idyll of wild romance perfects itself. But a posse of deranged Cornish gunmen are soon in hot pursuit and closing in fast. With everything to lose and the safety and anonymity of San Francisco still a distant speck on their horizon, the choices they make will haunt them for the rest of their lives.

In this love story for the ages—lyrical, profane and propulsive—Kevin Barry has once again demonstrated himself to be a master stylist, an unrivalled humourist, and a true poet of the human heart.

'He will spend three days alone on his island. That is all that he asks . . . John is so many miles from love now and home. This is the story of his strangest trip.' John owns a tiny island off the west coast of Ireland. Maybe it is there that he can at last outrun the shadows of his past. The tale of a wild journey into the world and a wild journey within, Beatlebone is a mystery box of a novel. It's a portrait of an artist at a time of creative strife. It is most of all a sad and beautiful comedy from one of the most gifted stylists now at work.

Dark Lies the Island is a wickedly funny and hugely original collection of stories about misspent love and crimes gone horribly wrong. In the Sunday Times Short Story Award–winning “Beer Trip to Llandudno,” a pack of middle-aged ale fanatics seeking the perfect pint find more than they bargained for. A pair of sinister old ladies prowl the countryside for a child to make their own. And a poet looking for inner calm buys an ancient inn on the west coast of Ireland but finds instead rancorous locals and catastrophic floodwaters.

Kevin Barry’s dazzling language, razor-sharp ear for the vernacular, and keen eye for the tragedies and comedies of daily life invest these tales with a startling vitality. Dark Lies the Island was short-listed for the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award, and as one of the most acclaimed collections in Europe in many years, it heralds the arrival of a new master of the short story

With three novels and two short story collections published, Kevin Barry has steadily established his stature as one of the finest writers not just in Ireland but in the English language. All of his prodigious gifts of language, character, and setting in these eleven exquisite stories transport the reader to an Ireland both timeless and recognizably modern. Shot through with dark humor and the uncanny power of the primal and unchanging Irish landscape, the stories in That Old Country Music represent some of the finest fiction being written today.

Escriptors frustrats, petons que no arriben, bevedors empedreïts, obscurs encantaments, els monstres i dimonis i pors que poblen la ment, un sàtir malèvol, joves turmentats i famílies perfectament disfuncionals són només una mostra de tot allò que Kevin Barry ens presenta en aquesta obra. L'autor de la perversa Ciutat de Bohane (2015, Raig Verd, guanyadora del Premi Impac 2013) ens ofereix una col·lecció d'imprevisibles relats d'amor, crueltat, crim, desesperació i llum. Kevin Barry ha estat descrit com «l'escriptor més sorprenent que ha sortit d'Irlanda en els darrers anys». Cada pàgina desborda de l'empatia, l'humor vandàlic i el llenguatge abrasador que marquen Kevin Barry com un gran artista i un contacontes singular. Aquest compendi reuneix els millors relats de les colleccions There are Little Kingdoms (2010) i Dark Lies the Island (2013), aquesta última guanyadora del EFG Private Bank Short Story Prize que atorga el Sunday Times, a més d'"Ox Mountain Death Song" (2012), publicat originalment a The New Yorker.