Search results for ""Banshee Press""

In her debut collection, Rosamund Taylor dares us across thresholds and invites us to glimpse the world as we've never seen it before. She boldly charts a journey of survival and transformation with poems on history reimagined, astronomy, sorcery, wild landscapes, talismanic creatures, and queer love. Taylor explores what it means to live in a female body that is not defined by lack, or want, or perpetual suffering, but is possessed by a real and defined sense of erotic autonomy. These poems burn from the inside out with possibility, and there is magic, mystery and reclamation at every turn. In Her Jaws is a landmark debut that extends and deepens the Irish tradition of writing the female perspective, while also breaking new ground. Praise for In Her Jaws: "A book of astonishments whose poems gaze towards the night sky and all that stirs in the dark below, swooping the reader through mysteries of desire and discovery. Taylor's voice is by turns tender, sharp, luminous; her poems are wondrous." - Doireann Ni Ghriofa "In these haunting, simmering metamorphoses, Rosamund Taylor's imagination is both intrepid and tender. Spanning the erotic and the traumatic, these poems root through the fibrous dark of our psyche. In Her Jaws is a breath-taking debut." - Sean Hewitt "Taylor's poems possess a talismanic quality. With lyric sorcery, she conjures encounters with a chorus of wild creatures: spectres and lovers, selves and others. Beneath the seductive gleam of her poetry lies an invitation to glimpse the fabulous. In Her Jaws will hold you in thrall." - Nidhi Zak/Aria Eipe "Rosamund Taylor's stunning debut reignites the lyric tradition with poems that movingly and daringly explore pain and despair, desire and belonging while evoking the more-than-human world anew. Her voice is ever original and ever beautiful." - Jane Clarke "In Her Jaws is an extraordinary achievement with poems gem-like in their intensity, clarity and precision - but make no mistake, there is wildness here too ... This is a debut that leaves bite marks in the most erotic and intoxicating sense ... In Her Jaws is here, finally, and it was certainly worth the wait." - Victoria Kennefick "Taylor's language, form and imagery exhibit a remarkable freshness, resulting in work that manages to create a space between the uncanny and the familiar. Her sexuality and her feminism are carried candidly and address universals through the specifics of queer love and the experiences of women through history. This is the Irish lyric tradition queered in the manifold and finest meanings of that word. Taylor's is a poetry I do not want to be without. We are all the richer for it." - Paul Maddern "In Her Jaws is by turns delicate and fierce; holding the reader gently in its muzzle, where we thrill to the awareness of teeth against our carotid. Taylor inhabits the natural world like no other writer working today; shapeshifting, questioning, and enthralling us with her curiosity. " - Jessica Traynor "The reader travels wild paths in skilled hands. Taylor's voice is evocative, assured and unforgettable. This is absolutely exquisite." - Deirdre Sullivan

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On their arrival in Trieste in 1904, James Joyce left Norah Barnacle outside a railway station while he went to scare up money. He got embroiled in a fight with a couple of sailors and was locked up for his troubles. A penniless Norah was left alone for almost an entire day and night sitting on their suitcases at the station in a city where she knew no one and where she didn't speak the language. In real life, Norah waited for him. This novel asks - what if she hadn't? In Penelope Unbound, one of our greatest living novelists weaves a spellbinding speculative history. By unhooking Norah from her famous husband, Morrissy gives her a compelling new voice, with heartbreak and humanity all her own. Sensual, inventive and uproariously funny, Penelope Unbound reimagines a Joycean heroine for the 21st century.

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Every time I write about my heart, I write about walking. Every time I write about walking, I write about my heart. What is it like to be born with a congenital heart defect? What does it mean to live knowing your heart will one day fail you? How do you walk without moving a muscle? In Pacemaker, poet David Toms deftly blends creative nonfiction, poetry and diary in an account of resisting, confronting, and living with a rare heart condition. His experience, including his hospitalisation during the Covid-19 pandemic, speaks to all of us in its exploration of what it means to live in a fragile yet resilient body, to walk multiple challenging paths, and to always a find a way to keep moving.

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In High Jump as Icarus Story, Gustav Parker Hibbett gifts us visions of flight and falling. This stunningly accomplished debut deconstructs and redefines notions of Blackness, queerness, and masculinity through the lens of myth, pop culture, and that most transcendent of sports - the high jump. Formally inventive, these poems speak in a capacious voice which can be vulnerable, fragmented, and rapturous; exhorting us to imagine and reimagine our possible selves while navigating a labyrinthine America that conjures its young into monsters. Taking us from the arroyos of New Mexico to a West Cork farm in winter, these meditations on beauty and the elusive nature of love are insightful, and hard-won. Here, the spirit triumphs, even when body falls: ''having/ reached for sunlight,/even if I failed to hold it.''

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Shortlisted for the Kate O'Brien Award 2020 Shortlisted for the John McGahern Annual Book Prize 2019 Shortlisted for the Dalkey Literary Awards Emerging Writer category 2020 Longlisted for the Edge Hill Short Story Prize 2020 Shortlisted for the Butler Literary Award 2020 In these eleven stories, debut author Lucy Sweeney Byrne invites us to experience travelling the world alone as a young woman, with all its attendant pleasures and dangers. The staff of a boat moored in Brooklyn rebel against their tyrannical boss. A drifting writer house-sits in the wilds of Donegal in the midst of a health scare. In a Texas dive bar, two former lovers try to salvage a friendship from their intense connection. And in Mexico, a frustrated artist navigates a city both dangerous and alluring. Whether set in New York, Oaxaca, Havana or back home in Dublin, the result is by turns sharp, fearless and heartbreaking. Laced with biting humour and devastating observations, Paris Syndrome introduces a unique literary talent. Praise for Paris Syndrome: 'Full of vitality and precision, and so rawly funny - this is a fabulous debut.' Kevin Barry 'A feisty portrayal of the bleakness of modern life, full of fruitless longing, misplaced knowing and black irony.' Sara Baume 'Gripping and beautiful, Paris Syndrome is spiced with the tang of many places, but it's through the territory of the human soul that it ventures most bravely. It doesn't just give you the world, it presents a universe.' Gavin Corbett 'With its tone of appalled hilarity, its roving portraiture of twentysomething lostness, and its narrator's youthfully cruel perceptions - often turned squarely on herself - Paris Syndrome is an addictive, keeps-you-up-till-the-birds-are-singing read.' Rob Doyle 'Fearless and wryly funny, the stories in Paris Syndrome are a finely calibrated mix of rage and wonder.' Danielle McLaughlin 'Harrowing and hilarious in equal measures - and often, somehow, at the same time - Paris Syndrome is an unforgettable portrait of millennial womanhood.' Paul Murray

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Deeply attuned to those things that make and unmake us, Dylan Brennan's Let The Dead concerns itself with life's alchemical processes. A couple breathe life into a doomed poppet, a photographer immortalises a corpse, Joyce and Breton rub shoulders on the streets of the poet's adopted Mexico, where life is a tapestry of 'delicate anthers' and 'disembodied tongues'. These dark meditations are set against poems which consider love, miscarriage, childbirth and the daily miracle of family life. Beautiful and disturbing by turns, these reflections on Ireland and Mexico's shared colonial past invoke topographies both real and imagined, where 'things in the ground have a tendency to grow.' Let the Dead reminds us of the power of art to shape our perception of history, and of the artist's responsibility in a time of violence.

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From the highly acclaimed author of Bad Day in Blackrock – inspiration for the 2012 award-winning film What Richard Did, directed by Lenny Abrahamson...Shortlisted for the 2021 An Post Irish Book Awards Eason Novel of the Year...A darkly funny, gripping and profoundly moving novel about a life spinning out of control, a life live without the bedrock of familial love, and the corruption of material wealth that tears at the soul.‘It was my father’s arrest that brought me here, although you could certainly say that I took the scenic route.’ Here is rehab, where Ben – the only son of a rich South Dublin banker – is piecing together the shattered remains of his life. Abruptly cut off, at the age of 27, from a life of heedless privilege, Ben flounders through a world of drugs and dead-end jobs, his self-esteem at rock bottom. Even his once-adoring girlfriend, Clio, is at the end of her tether. Then Ben runs into an old school friend who wants to cut him in on a scam: a shady property deal in the Balkans. The deal will make Ben rich and, at one fell swoop, will deliver him from all his troubles: his addictions, his father’s very public disgrace, and his own self-loathing and regret. Problems solved. But something is amiss. For one thing, the Serbian partners don’t exactly look like fools. (In fact they look like gangsters.) And, for another, Ben is being followed everywhere he goes. Someone is being taken for a ride. But who?Praise for White City:'I can't recommend it enough. It's often hilariously funny but it's also a sharp and smart dissection of contemporary materialism' John Boyne, author of The Heart's Invisible Furies 'An immensely enjoyable and tautly written account of a young man from an affluent family whose life of privilege is turned upside down' Sunday Times 'Spiky, blackly funny novel that offers an incisive study on class, entitlement and masculinity' Independent 'Capacious and comic, luxuriantly written, with an intricate plot and heightened characterisation… both riotous rant and thoughtful coming-of-age tale' Dublin Review of Books 'Outstanding second novel... A brilliantly entertaining novel that is profound in the most unexpected ways. Power is that rarity, a genuinely funny novelist... Yet all the more remarkable is Power's handling of tone: this novel moves effortlessly between humour and sincerity; it is steeped in empathy and raw anger' Literary Review ‘White City is likely to be the most solid, well-rounded novel to come out of Ireland this year… At once a pacy page-turner with a nerve-frazzling plot and a realistic and haunting tale of our interconnected world… White City is an all-round superb book that will stay with you long after the inevitable binge read’ Irish Independent 'White City synthesises familiar forms into a whole: the rogue’s confession, the young man finding his way, the post-Celtic Tiger satire on puffed-up, self-perpetuating bullshit businesses… Power shows his own capacity for comic timing and pithy aperçus' Guardian ' An extremely funny book… Kevin Power shows his chops as a proper heavyweight novelist. Unequivocally one of the most purely enjoyable books, in the classic-novel sense… a zinger on every page' Peter Murphy, Arena (RTE Radio 1) '[A] sprawling social satire of the sort we seldom see in Irish fiction… a tremendously zesty and zeitgeisty piece of writing' Sunday Times (Ireland) ‘[T]his dark caper evolves to ask searching moral questions… with its 11th-hour twist, this ambitious, attention-grabbing novel seems ripe for cinematic adaptation’ Daily Mail ‘Kevin Power’s Bad Day in Blackrock (2008) was one of the most memorable Irish novels of the new century… White City has passages of striking lyrical subtlety and the different storylines are managed with great dexterity. Much has changed in Ireland since Bad Day in Blackrock was published, but as Power’s adept and absorbing new novel reminds us, much has not. White City demands to be read’ Irish Times ‘A fast-paced and wickedly funny novel. Hugely entertaining. White City grabbed me from the opening pages and didn't let go’ Danielle McLaughlin, author of The Art of Falling 'Wild and beautiful, a whole addictive and breathlessly compelling world squeezed between these covers... A magnificent novel from a writer who is soaring to the most spectacular heights' Billy O'Callaghan, author of Life Sentences 'White City is a dark, hilarious and emotionally profound study of the toxic effects of greed and entitlement. Also, a story brilliantly and movingly told. Couldn’t stop reading it. Will read it again' Ed O'Loughlin, author of Not Untrue and Not Unkind '[A] biting page-turner… Power’s writing is both strong and savage' John Walshe, The Business Post''Funny, and gorgeously written, and just relentlessly entertaining' Mark O'Connell, author of Notes from an Apocalypse'This is part thriller but mostly a look at what it means to grow up... This novel is pleasing on so many levels, both intellectually & emotionally... You'll laugh, you'll cry... Read it, read it, read it' Claire Hennessy, author, editor & publisher at Banshee Press 'The kind of novel that makes writers jealous and readers cancel all their plans to finish it. As a commentary on the classless contemporary upper class, it's cutting and hilarious; as a portrait of the artist as a young man waylaid by his membership in that class, it's profound, unpretentious, unapologetically intelligent, and, again, really hilarious' Lauren Oyler, author of Fake Accounts'White City is brilliant on the high-octane vacuity of Ireland’s rentier class. Power’s trademark shimmering prose counterpoints a driving narrative... Brilliant' Eoin McNamee, author of Resurrection Man and The Blue Tango

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From the highly acclaimed author of Bad Day in Blackrock – inspiration for the 2012 award-winning film What Richard Did, directed by Lenny Abrahamson... ​Shortlisted for the 2021 An Post Irish Book Awards Eason Novel of the Year...A darkly funny, gripping and profoundly moving novel about a life spinning out of control, a life live without the bedrock of familial love, and the corruption of material wealth that tears at the soul.‘It was my father’s arrest that brought me here, although you could certainly say that I took the scenic route.’ Here is rehab, where Ben – the only son of a rich South Dublin banker – is piecing together the shattered remains of his life. Abruptly cut off, at the age of 27, from a life of heedless privilege, Ben flounders through a world of drugs and dead-end jobs, his self-esteem at rock bottom. Even his once-adoring girlfriend, Clio, is at the end of her tether. Then Ben runs into an old school friend who wants to cut him in on a scam: a shady property deal in the Balkans. The deal will make Ben rich and, at one fell swoop, will deliver him from all his troubles: his addictions, his father’s very public disgrace, and his own self-loathing and regret. Problems solved. But something is amiss. For one thing, the Serbian partners don’t exactly look like fools. (In fact they look like gangsters.) And, for another, Ben is being followed everywhere he goes. Someone is being taken for a ride. But who?Praise for White City:'I can't recommend it enough. It's often hilariously funny but it's also a sharp and smart dissection of contemporary materialism' John Boyne, author of The Heart's Invisible Furies 'An immensely enjoyable and tautly written account of a young man from an affluent family whose life of privilege is turned upside down' Sunday Times 'Spiky, blackly funny novel that offers an incisive study on class, entitlement and masculinity' Independent 'Capacious and comic, luxuriantly written, with an intricate plot and heightened characterisation… both riotous rant and thoughtful coming-of-age tale' Dublin Review of Books 'Outstanding second novel... A brilliantly entertaining novel that is profound in the most unexpected ways. Power is that rarity, a genuinely funny novelist... Yet all the more remarkable is Power's handling of tone: this novel moves effortlessly between humour and sincerity; it is steeped in empathy and raw anger' Literary Review ‘White City is likely to be the most solid, well-rounded novel to come out of Ireland this year… At once a pacy page-turner with a nerve-frazzling plot and a realistic and haunting tale of our interconnected world… White City is an all-round superb book that will stay with you long after the inevitable binge read’ Irish Independent 'White City synthesises familiar forms into a whole: the rogue’s confession, the young man finding his way, the post-Celtic Tiger satire on puffed-up, self-perpetuating bullshit businesses… Power shows his own capacity for comic timing and pithy aperçus' Guardian ' An extremely funny book… Kevin Power shows his chops as a proper heavyweight novelist. Unequivocally one of the most purely enjoyable books, in the classic-novel sense… a zinger on every page' Peter Murphy, Arena (RTE Radio 1) '[A] sprawling social satire of the sort we seldom see in Irish fiction… a tremendously zesty and zeitgeisty piece of writing' Sunday Times (Ireland) ‘[T]his dark caper evolves to ask searching moral questions… with its 11th-hour twist, this ambitious, attention-grabbing novel seems ripe for cinematic adaptation’ Daily Mail ‘Kevin Power’s Bad Day in Blackrock (2008) was one of the most memorable Irish novels of the new century… White City has passages of striking lyrical subtlety and the different storylines are managed with great dexterity. Much has changed in Ireland since Bad Day in Blackrock was published, but as Power’s adept and absorbing new novel reminds us, much has not. White City demands to be read’ Irish Times ‘A fast-paced and wickedly funny novel. Hugely entertaining. White City grabbed me from the opening pages and didn't let go’ Danielle McLaughlin, author of The Art of Falling 'Wild and beautiful, a whole addictive and breathlessly compelling world squeezed between these covers... A magnificent novel from a writer who is soaring to the most spectacular heights' Billy O'Callaghan, author of Life Sentences 'White City is a dark, hilarious and emotionally profound study of the toxic effects of greed and entitlement. Also, a story brilliantly and movingly told. Couldn’t stop reading it. Will read it again' Ed O'Loughlin, author of Not Untrue and Not Unkind '[A] biting page-turner… Power’s writing is both strong and savage' John Walshe, The Business Post''Funny, and gorgeously written, and just relentlessly entertaining' Mark O'Connell, author of Notes from an Apocalypse'This is part thriller but mostly a look at what it means to grow up... This novel is pleasing on so many levels, both intellectually & emotionally... You'll laugh, you'll cry... Read it, read it, read it' Claire Hennessy, author, editor & publisher at Banshee Press 'The kind of novel that makes writers jealous and readers cancel all their plans to finish it. As a commentary on the classless contemporary upper class, it's cutting and hilarious; as a portrait of the artist as a young man waylaid by his membership in that class, it's profound, unpretentious, unapologetically intelligent, and, again, really hilarious' Lauren Oyler, author of Fake Accounts'White City is brilliant on the high-octane vacuity of Ireland’s rentier class. Power’s trademark shimmering prose counterpoints a driving narrative... Brilliant' Eoin McNamee, author of Resurrection Man and The Blue Tango

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