Search results for ""dalkey archive press""

One of the most remarkable books of contemporary Mexican literature, The Obstacles is the story of young writers coming of age in a world dominated entirely by their own fictions. It tells, in alternating chapters, the stories of two teenagers, Ricardo and Elias, who are characters in each others' novels.Blurring our notions of reality and fiction, Eloy Urroz takes the reader into a world where characters invent characters and challenge their creators. And the book's conclusion--in which a surprising connection between Ricardo and Elias is revealed--shows that not even fiction can be controlled in a world of such incredible unpredictability.

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The Power of Flies begins in a courtroom, where a man is undergoing an interrogation. He has committed a crime, and he must now explain himself. But instead of letting the judge, lawyer, and psychiatrist question him, he asks himself all the questions--and answers them. While ranting on to the court about various topics--his family, the museum where he works as a tour guide, and even the French philosopher and mathematician, Blaise Pascal--the narrator of The Power of Flies reveals himself to be both calculating and unstable. In this latest novel from acclaimed French writer Lydie Salvayre, it is up to the reader to sort through his philosophical diatribe to discover why this man turned killer.

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Including pieces on Gregory Bateson, William Faulkner, Philip Pullman, Sir Oswald Mosley's politics, religion and stammering, this diverse collection gathers essays written by Nicholas Mosley over the past forty years. Resembling the behaviour of slime mould - a strange organism made up of separate amoebae that temporarily form a single pillar which then bursts in order to scatter its seeds across the forest floor - the ideas found in these essays converge and disperse, crossing over into other disciplines, and creating a unique way of looking at the world, one echoed in Mosley's fictional writings.

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Paying homage to the Italian-American experience, Italian Stories celebrates an Italian neighbourhood in the Bronx during the 1930s and '40s, and mourns the loss of this ethnic identity with the migration of subsequent generations to the suburbs. With stories that are both melancholy and comic, Papaleo here explores the contradictory desires of assimilation: his characters want to live the life of the average American while maintaining a strong link to their rich heritage. In addition, Papaleo rails against the damaging stereotypes of Italian-Americans propagated by the media in movies and television.

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Grattan Fletcher and Suck Ryle are on the road, risking their dignity and occasionally their lives to renew the civic spirit of Ireland. Grattan is an idealistic, ageing civil servant who has enlisted Ryle, a skeptic prone to violent temper, in a quixotic quest to make a better Irish future for Grattan’s granddaughter. Along the way, they encounter politicians, protesters, and power brokers, some of whom are fascinated and others only flummoxed by Grattan’s wide sympathies and wild philosophical musings. In sprawling comic fashion, Grattan and Me addresses countless contemporary political, economic and ecological problems, allowing no person or institution to remain safe from ridicule.

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The narrator of this novel begins by introducing himself not as a speaker but a listener, spellbound by his friend Caracala's yarns, which blend accounts of youthful mischief with casual references to Cervantes and Laurence Sterne. At first, the spotlight is entirely on Caracala, but the narrator soon begins to distrust his friend, concluding that Caracala is no more than a sham: a performer. Yet the reader will in turn come to doubt the narrator's own pretensions to honesty, until every source of information has become so unreliable as to make the very notion of a "true story" seem like blatant propaganda.

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When his marriage and career fall apart, a young lawyer sets out on a desperate mission to recapture the promise of his youth. His attempt leaves him stranded between a past he no longer recognizes and a life that’s no longer his—and he soon begins to suspect that the surest path to happiness lies in simply giving up. A moving, tragicomic novel about defeat, memory, and the seductive prospect of losing it all.

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-- Talking bridges the stylistic gap between David Antin's early experimental poems and the talk pieces for which he is most well-known. Combining one poem with two improvisations and his first published talk-poem, Talking is a unique book that cannot be classified as solely poetry, fiction or criticism. Infusing the lyricism of poetry with the compelling pull of the spoken voice, this collection is a testament to David Antin's reputation as one of the most influential artists of the contemporary era.

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-- Dying in a bamboo bed, Captain Clancy hallucinates several philosophical conversations with a snake and a tiger. Meanwhile, Captain Knightbridge and Nurse Jane of the Search & Rescue Unit have sex in their helicopter -- the Bamboo Bed -- at 10,000 feet, setting a wartime record. Down below, two hippy kids wander the forest trying to end the Vietnam war with a dream and a guitar. In the tradition of Catch-22 and Dr. Strangelove, The Bamboo Bed treats with hilarity and outrage the grim absurdity of war.

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Moving from character to character, perspective to perspective, Homesick is a complex and moving portrait of parallel lives and failing love in a time of permanent war.

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A musty bar in off-season Cannon Beach, Oregon, provides the setting for an unsuspecting Frenchman’s introduction to the many ways life can go wrong for the unlucky in America. He listens as the barflies nightly recount their tales of woe—betrayal, broken families, financial ruin. Though they seem at first to tolerate the newcomer’s presence and sympathy, a tide of violence is rising, one he perceives only dimly until it is too late to escape. Made doubly powerful by her poetic fascination with the violence and volatility of the American landscape itself, Montalbetti’s novel is a thrilling study of the senseless cruelty disappointed men are capable of.

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In a parallel or future Estonia, whose language has been outlawed and its native population deported after the invasion by the Russian Tsardom, Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol is resurrected, Christ-like, bringing phantasmagoric mayhem to the sleepy town of Viljandi. By the end of the story, four evangelists will have emerged from the novel’s ragtag cast of Russian- speaking beatniks, bohemians, booksellers, blaggers, and Beatles- maniacs to write their subversive Gogol Gospels in the local insane asylum, despite efforts to thwart them on the part of the mysterious Murka, heroine of a criminal underworld ballad and agent of the Tsardom’s secret police. By turns exuberant, grotesque, erudite, oneiric, hilarious, mystical, psychedelic, and dystopian, Gogol’s Disco tells the parable of a small nation, whose gigantic neighbor quite literally consigns its literature to the latrine, only for it to rise from the dead in a literarily spectacular apocalypse in the best traditions of Bulgakov and magic realism.

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13 October -01 and inching toward midnight, Lieutenant Frances Villegas sits at a Steinway trying desperately to play Stravinsky’s Petrushka while the Colonel watches, wheezing from a wing chair. They are waiting on the enigmatic voice of the people, Adjutant General Arjún J. Joglar, due to arrive at any minute from Lares. Downstairs, Baldomero Richter, presiding over a captive body stripped bare of clothes, hair, genitals, and one ear, awaits an order to terminate. It is the eve of the Evangelist Insurrection and in a few hours the great city of XXX XXXX will go up in smoke, swallowed by the warm waters of the Caribbean. All of this to declare, finally, independence. 2 March 1917, the Jones-Shafroth Act determined that Puerto Ricans would forever thereafter be mainland American citizens. One hundred years later, The Sovereign marks the centennial anniversary of the Jones Act as both paean and polemic for the history of the island nation. A hybrid chronicle stretching itself in every temporal direction, the charming magical realism of the Latin Boom (that forgot about Puerto Rico) is here warped by the uncanny spectacle of an emancipated colonial imaginary. The Sovereign is an extended meditation on what it means to be ecstatically free-and the blood price a people must pay for that freedom.

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A collection of fifteen stories, Jean McGarry’s No Harm Done, depicts family life at its worst, best, and funniest, as if the author had conjoined the lunacy of Cold Comfort Farm with the bitter grievances of Dubliners. As the author writes in “Strong Boy,” this might be “…because every family, rich or poor, is roughage.” The characters, gallant, goofy, gifted, and grim, include sickly mothers of a dozen children, boozy fathers with a gift of the gab, kids aspiring to be nuns and priests, or just to get out of town with a whole skin. A section is devoted to one marriage made in heaven: a Jewish psychoanalyst devoted to his ex-nun wife. Another set of stories reworks familiar fairy tales, setting them in the wild present. No Harm Done (whose title is Irish code for wishful thinking) concludes with a truce to the war between the sexes, and indeed a `solution’ to the tragicomedy that is marriage and family.

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A young writer has his heart set on his aunt's large apartment. With this seemingly simple conceit, the characters of The Planetarium are set in orbit and a galaxy of argument, resentment, and bitterness erupts. Telling the story from various points of view, Sarraute focuses below the surface, on the emotional lives of the characters in a way that surpasses even Virginia Woolf. Always deeply engaging, The Planetarium reveals the deep disparity between the way we see ourselves and the way others see us.

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Otohiko Kaga’s Marshland is an epic novel on a Tolstoyan scale, running from the pre-World War II period to the turbulence of 1960s Japan. At forty-nine, Atsuo Yukimori is a humble auto mechanic living an almost penitentially quiet life in Tokyo, where his coworkers know something of his military record but nothing of his postwar past as a petty criminal. Out of curiosity he accompanies his nephew to a demonstration at a nearby university, and is gradually drawn into a friendship, then a romance, with Wakako Ikéhata, the brilliant but mentally unstable daughter of a university professor. As some of the student radical groups turn to violence and terrorism, Atsuo and Wakako find themselves framed for the lethal bombing of a Tokyo train.During their long imprisonment the novel becomes a Kafkaesque procedural, revealing the corrupt intricacies of the police and judicial system of Japan. At the end of their hard pilgrimage to exoneration, Atsuo and Wakako are finally able to return to his original hometown, Nemuro, on the eastern-most peninsula of Hokkaido island. Here is the marshland of the title, a remote and virtually unspoiled region of Japan where Kaga sets a large number of extraordinarily beautiful pastoral scenes.Marshland is a revelation of modern Japanese history and culture, a major novel from the hand of a master well-known in his own country, though only the second to be translated into English: the wealth of Kaga’s work in fiction remains to be discovered by the Anglophone world.

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Set in Macedonia at the beginning of the twentieth century, the novel Infidelity draws on myth and history to tell an unusual story of star-crossed lovers.When his proposal to Luna is rejected by her parents, the intrepid Sunny goes to America to earn enough money to win her hand. However, only days after he sets sail, Sunny finds himself drawn to another woman, a passenger aboard the ship taking him to the New World. In a simple, fairytale-like style, told from multiple perspectives, Trajkoski tells an immersive story of inner conflict, heartbreak, and loss.

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Fragma is the debut collection of short fiction by award-winning Slovenian writer Mojca Kumerdej. Kumerdej's writing is witty, lucid, darkly funny—a style that leads us to sympathize with, even as we loathe, characters who are obsessed with their luxury cars and jealous of their own daughters. Her stories of sadism, masochism, codependence, and violence in multiple forms introduce us to an utterly unique voice, valuable for what it tells us about contemporary Slovenia, but even more for what it can tell us about ourselves.

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Mere Chances collects some of Veronika Simoniti’s most singular and strange stories. A linguistic experimentalist in the tradition of Julio Cortazar, Simoniti populates her tales with homeless and nomadic characters struggling to fashion or to maintain their identities as they cross physical and linguistic borders. Whether compelled to communicate in codes not their own or grappling with the loss of language itself, her characters’ struggles to forge stable identities point to the way human language, while fundamental to the formation of the self, is often an unreliable and imperfect tool.

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Alma Mahler presents the imagined memories of a talented, passionate woman living in the shadow of a famous husband. The novel deals with Alma’s marriage to the distant and introverted Gustav Mahler, the Austrian late-Romantic composer and conductor, and with the many intellectual and emotional sacrifices Alma makes in order to be a support for him. Throughout, Alma wrestles with the tension between her desire to be near genius and her growing awareness that all she will ever receive in return for her sacrifice are the great man’s silence and the pains of solitude.

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Written in alternating voices, Jorge Guzman’s Job-Boj is a captivating novel that explores the progression from melancholy to happiness, or vice versa. The delicate interplay between a light-hearted narrator and a brooding, introspective one draws the reader in to question identity. Are they the same man? Two different periods from the same life? Or are they two separate people? The reader is left to judge. While the novel is a superb masterclass in structure and innovation, Job-Boj is a “rich and absorbing entertainment.”

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A forty-year-old man, burying himself in work and avoiding close emotional bonds with people, pays a visit to his mother in the country and is forced to extend it upon discovering her illness. While there, he reevaluates past familial and romantic relationships and finally attempts to build new ones. Gestures is “a psychologically precise and moving autopsy of a `man in the wake of ordeals.'”

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Ch’oe Yun’s Mannequin is a novel that reflects on the meaning of beauty and its many facets of existence. The beauty of the main character, Jini, is captured through a carefree imagination that describes it as “the music of the wind,” or something that can’t be described in words. Through the beauty that penetrates and captivates us in fleeting moments, the novel leads us to critically reflect on the question of what true beauty is in a world where people are captivated by the beauty of advertising models in a flood of new products. In that respect, Mannequin, as the title implies, is a sad allegory on a capitalistic society in which a woman’s body, artificial and standardized, becomes a product.

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REYoung`s latest features a nation buried in snow and ice in an obligatory 365 days a year Christmas celebration, a tribe of Mayan warriors in comedy troupe disguise, an existentially challenged hero known as the Snowman on a quest that takes him south of the border down ol’ Mexico way, and a B-grade movie director named Boone Weller with his own agenda. Is it a book? A movie? Told in a shoot from the hip Texas style, Margarito and the Snowman is loose, rangy, battered with an attitude and bound to offend everybody.

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Johanne, Johanne . . . is an SMS-novel about a young woman’s flight from the often mundane reality of everyday existence and her knife-edge attempt at forging an identity for herself in a lifestyle-obsessed big city environment, where unlimited options seem available at every turn: freedom, career, excitement, sex, love, security, husband and babies, “whatever.” A cleverly constructed, multi-layered story that initially reads as a sexting novel but soon confronts every reader with a range of much deeper questions. A smartphone mirror into the way we live right now, where Fifty Shades of Grey is shocked to meet Flaubert and Ki- erkegaard in digital space.

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At last available in English translation, "Soy Realidad" is Tomaž Šalamun's twenty-first collection of poetry, originally published in 1985. Showing a maturing poet at home as a citizen of the world, "Soy Realidad" ranges far from Šalamun's Slovenia, combining his native language with Latin, French, English, and Spanish, as well as evoking such places as Belize, the Sierra Nevada, and Mexico City. From sex to God, from landscape to literature, Šalamun's poetry is as ever a restless and witty inquisitor, peeling back the layers of the world.

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Eliza travels to Sydney to deal with the estate of her Aunt Dodge, and finds Maxine, a hitherto unknown cousin, occupying Dodge’s apartment. When legal complications derail plans to live it up on their inheritance, the women’s lives become consumed by absurd attempts to deal with Australian tax law, as well their own mounting boredom and squalor. The most astonishing debut novel of the decade, Dodge Rose calls to mind Henry Green in its skewed use of colloquial speech, Joyce in its love of inventories, and William Gaddis in its virtuoso lampooning of law, high finance, and national myth.

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Dublin, some years from now, and the President of the United States has just been assassinated during a state dinner in his honour. The official account has already taken hold but a hawk-eyed octogenarian named Monk, believing that there's nothing that cannot be known, has a version of his own -- a dark and twisted tale of both the watcher and the watched.Nothing gets past a man as invisible as me, he says, introducing us to a cast of damaged characters he has kept under the strictest surveillance for years. Chief among them is Schroeder, recently sacked from Trinity College, where he once taught the Presidential daughter, and is now wandering the city streets in a medicated fugue as sinister and violent events begin to take control of his life. But this, says Monk, is no thriller or invented tale of suspense. It is, he insists, an honest and faithful record of breakage and distress at a time when dysfunction -- personal, local, national, global and even cosmic -- pervades all. A time when everything is already broken and when, in many ways, the shooting of a pill-popping President is neither here nor there. The only thing that matters, Monk tells us, is the truth.And this is why, stationed high in his attic room with a Stoli in a highball, he does what he does. There's divinity in it, he says. And a modicum of love.

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In this collection which contains both autobiography and fiction, the prominent Estonian artist and writer Toomas Vint, whose career spans the Soviet period and Estonia’s re-gaining of independence, demonstrates his characteristic mischievous, dark sense of humour, an artist’s eye for visual detail, and an experimental approach to form. His main themes are the fine dividing line between fantasy and reality, man’s foibles, frailties and capacity for self-deception, and the absurd and sometimes tragicomic nature of the human condition.

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"Man + Doctor" is Nicholas Wadley's wordless story of encounters with doctors, from the patient's attempts to avoid the scalpel, to, once surgery becomes inevitable, watching himself learn to cope with days and weeks spent in hospital beds.

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There is no doubt that Desmond Hogan is one of most remarkable literary talents to have come out of Ireland in the past half-century, and perhaps the best introduction to his work is through his magnificent short stories, widely anthologized and praised throughout the world. Focusing as always on the downtrodden and the eccentric, the misplaced and the dispossessed, Hogan's stories merge past with present, landscape with mindscape-distinctly Irish and burdened by history, while exhilaratingly and wholly universal and modern.

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The long-awaited final work and magnum opus of one of the United States’s greatest authors, critics, and tastemakers, In Partial Disgrace is a sprawling self-contained trilogy chronicling the troubled history of a small Central European nation bearing certain similarities to Hungary—and whose rise and fall might be said to parallel the strange contortions taken by Western political and literary thought over the course of the twentieth century. More than twenty years in the making, and containing a cast of characters, breadth of insight, and degree of stylistic legerdemain to rival such staggering achievements as William H. Gass’s The Tunnel, Carlos Fuentes’s Terra Nostra, Robert Coover’s The Public Burning, or Péter Nádas’s Parallel Lives, In Partial Disgrace may be the last great work to issue from the generation that changed American letters in the ’60s and ’70s.

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A dizzying look at the backrooms of literature, with petty squabbles, long-nurtured grudges, envied or undeserved prizes, failing publishers, and self-important critics, "The No Variations" is a serious game, or perhaps a frivolous tragedy.

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One of the defining texts of twentieth-century Catalan fiction, written by one of its most innovative and cherished writers, Salvador Espriu's "Ariadne in the Grotesque Labyrinth" is a collection of thirty-four short stories in which the twists and turns of action, character, and place are as winding and sumptuous as the legendary maze of its title. Originally published in 1935 in the midst of great countrywide political and social upheaval, these stories are a mirror, a grotesque mirror, held up to Catalan and Spanish society. Infused with a deep sense of mythic power, blending social realism with lush modernist experiment, " Ariadne in the Grotesque Labyrinth" is a triumph of style. Perhaps best known for his poetry, Espriu's rich lyricism and highly evocative use of the Catalan language are here brought to life in the poet Rowan Ricardo Phillips's remarkable English-language translation of a classic of world literature.

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The Marquis de Sade is alive and well and living in Sweden—or perhaps author Nikanor Teratologen is the devil himself, sending the English-speaking world a Scandinavian squib to remind readers that such reassuring figures as vampires and serial killers are no more frightening than pixies or unicorns in light of the depravity contained in one quiet suburb. Reading like a deranged hybrid of Deliverance, Naked Lunch, and Tuesdays with Morrie, and rivaling The 120 Days of Sodom in its challenge to our assumptions as to what is acceptable (or not) in literature, Assisted Living presents us with a series of queasy anecdotes concerning an eleven-year-old boy and his grandfather, a monster for whom murder, violence, incest, drunkenness, and philosophy all pass as equally valid ways to spend one’s time. Whether it’s a study in excess, a parody of provincial proto-fascism, a clear-eyed look at evil, or simply a prodigious literary dare, Assisted Living is unlikely to leave you indifferent.

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The passions, frustrations, fleeting affairs, and failed relationships of an Argentinian writer in New York.

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Benjamin Thompson, Count Rumford, was—as Nicholas Delbanco writes—“world famous in his lifetime,” yet now he has been “almost wholly forgotten.” Like Delbanco himself, Sally Ormsby Thompson Robinson—the narrator of this novel and the Count’s fictional, last-surviving relative—is “haunted” by one of history’s most fascinating and remarkable figures. On par with Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin, Count Rumford was, among many other things, a politician, a spy, a philanthropist, and above all, a scientist. Based on countless historical documents, including letters and essays by Thompson himself, The Count of Concord brings to life the remarkable career of Benjamin Thompson, Count Rumford.

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A modern-day Don Quixote and an exile in his own hometown, the protagonist of Teeth Under the Sun is kept from writing by a conspiracy (real? imagined?) designed to prevent him from revealing the truth about the town's strange status quo and violent past.In a place where people have abandoned their houses for tiny apartments in the confines of new high-rises, the narrator walks the almost empty streets, remembering better times and meeting figures from his past: his ex-wife, his son, writers, friends, and revolutionaries. And all of this is interspersed with his memories of the movies Fact and fiction, past and present, all meet in this story of the narrator's attempts to engage more fully with a modern world forcing him into isolation.

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The hiring of a new secretary shouldn't be a big deal--just a slight a change in the office environment. But for the protagonist of this novel, it is a declaration of war, a call to arms: "The new secretary has only been here two days," she says, "and I'm already talking about evil, a word I shouldn't even be using--arming myself for battle and choosing my weapons." Her quiet life of sacrifice and service has been rudely disrupted by the new hire, and she is not--despite the advice of her doctor, her neighbors, and her daughter--about to leave it at that. Instead, sabotage, alcohol, and kindness become the arsenal in a conflict fought across copy rooms and office parties. But the humor is undercut by a sadness, a sense of defeat that makes this slim novel resonate with the injustice of our increasingly impersonal, corporate world.

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Joseph Dewey, "Rick Moody" Brian Evenson & Joanna Howard, "Ann Quin" Zachary Hammerman, Ed., "Casebook Study of Silas Flannery"

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Martereau is narrated by a tubercular young man driven by a compulsion to discover what lies behind faades, especially in relation to the adults around him. He's particularly interested in Martereau, his uncle's devoted friend and business associate. All in all, Martereau seems like a trustworthy, benign, self-sufficient man, but under the narrator's intense scrutiny--and Martereau's suspect behavior concerning a shady real-estate deal--his motives seem much more complex and seedy. In a subtle, skillful way, Nathalie Sarraute explores the difference between those who are wealthy and those who pretend to be so, and the manipulative way in which some people get ahead in the world.

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Told almost exclusively through dialogue, Konfidenz opens with a woman entering a hotel room and receiving a call from a mysterious stranger who seems to know everything about her and the reasons why she has fled her homeland. Over the next nine hours he tells her many disturbing things about her lover (who may be in great danger), the political situation in which they are enmeshed, and his fantasies of her. A terse political allegory that challenges our assumptions about character, the foundations of our knowledge, and the making of history, Konfidenz draws the reader into a postmodern mystery where nothing--including the text itself--is what it seems.

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A seeing-eye dog leads a blind man into a frozen river, a southern Baptist loses his memory and finds true love in Bel Air, an obese dot.com executive has "anorgasmic" latex sex with her CEO, and a homeless man in New York creates an intellectual universe based on Post-it notes stuck to the inside of his cardboard box shelter--Douglas Glover's stories are wildly inventive, deadpan comedies of our universal human catastrophe. They are sly, demanding and wise--stories about language, desire and love (in a very dark place). The humor veers from the wry and sardonic to the salacious, mordant and playful. And always there are moments of such stark emotional intimacy that the reader slides, almost without noticing, from laughter to lament.

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For nearly 20 years, the Review of Contemporary Fiction has celebrated and promoted the study of innovative fiction by featuring some of the most influential authors of the twentieth century.Recently the Review changed its format, and instead of several essays on the work of one or two authors the Review now features three or four authors with one long essay apiece devoted to the discussion of their writing careers.Still providing both an introduction to experimental fiction writers and interpretive strategies for reading their work, this new format allows for the inclusion of younger writers and those whose work has not been widely studied.Occasionally, the Review will feature special issues devoted to new fiction from around the world or to essays and fiction by important novelists and critics.

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The three novellas collected in Van Gogh's Room at Arles demonstrate once again Stanley Elkin's mastery of the English language, with exuberant rants on almost every page, unexpected plot twists, and jokes that leave readers torn between laughter and tears. Her Sense of Timing relates a destructive day in the life of a wheelchair-bound professor who is abandoned by his wife at the worst possible time, leaving him to preside -- helplessly -- over a party for his students that careens out of control. The second story in this collection tells of an unsuspecting commoner catapulted into royalty when she catches the wandering eye of Prince Larry of Wales. And in the title story, a community college professor searches for his scholarly identity in a land of academic giants while staying in Van Gogh's famous room at Arles and avoiding run-ins with the Club of the Portraits of the Descendants of the People Painted by Vincent Van Gogh.

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Surrounded by cemeteries in the flatlands of New Jersey, the small town of Lud is sustained by the business of death. In fact, with no synagogue and no congregation, Rabbi Jerry Goldkorn has only one true responsibility: to preside over burial services for Jews who pass away in the surrounding cities. But after the Arctic misadventures that led him to Lud, he wouldn't want to live (or die) anywhere else.As the only living child in Lud, his daughter Connie has a different opinion of this grisly city, and she will do anything to get away from it--or at least liven it up a bit. Things get lively indeed when Connie testifies to meeting the Virgin Mary for a late-night romp through the local graveyards.

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Farley, a seventy-five year old man, lies on his bathroom floor, having just suffered a stroke. As his mind sifts through his past, we are introduced to the loyal friend he once was, his loving wife, the city of Dublin, and the question of how this very ordinary man has become so lonely at the end of his life. Told in reverse, from Farley's penultimate day to decades before, Christine Dwyer Hickey's bestseller is a jarring look at a life up close. First published in 2011, The Cold Eye of Heaven shows Dwyer Hickey's lyrical prose at its best: rendering sorrow, joy, wisdom, and humor in equal measure. Acutely insightful, this is an eerily accurate portrait of what it's like to grow old.

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