That Old Country Music: Stories
Kevin Barry
Rave
Positive
Mixed
Pan
That Old Country Music: Stories
Kevin Barry
Rave
Positive
Mixed
Pan
Rave
Positive
Mixed
Pan
... a story brimming with both the desire for and the fear of strong feeling, handled with a loose, supple comedy.
There's not a bad story in the bunch, and it's as accomplished a book as Barry has ever written.
Barry is particularly impressive as a writer of men’s voices and stories, which means that he has the rare art of being able to convey in sentences what is not said, not even fully thought, by his characters.
These are romantic stories, and Barry is a romantic writer. I mean romantic in the old-fashioned literary sense: mood-haunted, place-haunted, devoted to the themes of love and loss and self-creation.
... the animating force behind these tortuous yearnings and consummations is mortality — or the fear of it.
... lyrical.
Easygoing in their elegance and capacious in their emotional range, these stories draw naturally from Ireland’s literary tradition without becoming distorted by nostalgia or homage.
Passion proves hazardous for the loners and oddballs who drift through Barry’s forceful landscape.
Like Ireland, the island on which Kevin Barry’s fiction is set, the characters that populate his works are remote yet tantalizingly close to others who may offer promise or enrichment.
Barry’s characters are painted in their smaller moments of yearning, hope and resignation, no one particularly announcing themselves.
... more traditionally contained. What connects the novels and the stories is Barry’s style, a nervy mix of high poetry and low comedy that he applies with unceasing vigor.
As great as Barry’s novels are, the short story – and That Old Country Music offers pretty strong supporting evidence, as did his previous collections There Are Little Kingdoms, and Dark Lies The Island – might be his more natural home.
You should read this collection at least twice. The first time, horse it into you—then study the technique.
Shafts of high comedy have always distinguished Barry’s work, the swerve from grief into blessed laughter, devastating throwaway lines summing up a life or a failure. His knockout way to turn a sentence remains, but there are fewer laughs here; urban larks and verbals replaced by an undercurrent of sadness.
... the prose throughout is fresh and sometimes startling, and the details have a poetic beauty.
Barry’s beautiful tone poem of a novel, these 11 lyrical short stories, set mainly in the west of Ireland, are imbued with the melancholy of an Irish folk ballad, but that bone-deep sadness exists alongside pulsing, deeply felt life.
Few imaginative writers signal their process or intent as blatantly as Kevin Barry in his third collection of short fiction.
With this new collection, the author seems especially keen on bridging the gap between lyrical and narrative concerns—in other words, creating something beautiful while also making sure the reader cares.
In his third collection of short stories, Kevin Barry reveals himself to be quite the romantic.
As magical as it is beautiful, this country is vividly depicted in stories that share the timeless themes of love, loss, tragedy and fate.
[A] catalog of hauntings. The characters who populate these eleven stories are bedeviled by phantoms: memories and possibilities, places they can’t forget, and people they really should. The resultant confrontations are chronicled by the Irish author with equal parts earthy relatability and offhand poeticism.
Sewn together in an assorted, agrestic patchwork, Kevin Barry's third collection of shorts stories has a thorough line of romanticism, seclusion and whitethorns that fasten this 174-page collection into an assured, cohesive and witty read.
Tales of love, lust, and country life by the gifted Irish writer.
Irish writer Barry follows Night Boat to Tangier with a rather mixed story collection.