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Antarctica: ‘A genuine once-in-a-generation writer.’ THE TIMES

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Small Things Like These has been described as historical fiction, yet the author disagrees with it being a novel about the Magdalene laundries ( Guardian interview, October 21), saying, ‘I think it’s a story about a man who was loved in his youth and can’t resist offering the same type of love to somebody else’. Confidently rooted in today's global provincialism, the stories explore mostly rural family life, whether in Ireland, the US or Britain. p. 107) In this scene towards the end of the novel, in which Furlong escorts one of the girls from the laundry outside and through the streets to his home, what personal battle is he also facing? When she surfaced, he was standing there in the steam, wiping traces of shaving foam off his chin, smiling. Compassionate, witty, and unsettling, Antarctica is the debut collection of one of Ireland’s most exciting and versatile new talents.

Even before Small Things is out in English, its French translation, published last November, has won two prizes. I came to this collection knowing she received her undergrad degree in New Orleans and wondering if her time here might've informed any of it. Small Things Like These was shortlisted for the 2022 Booker Prize, and for the Rathbones Folio Prize, awarded for the best work of literature, regardless of form, to be published in the English language, and won the Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year Award and the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction.Val Nolan’s definitive history of the John McGahern banning appeared in Irish Studies Review (2011) while his story ‘The Irish Astronaut’ was shortlisted for the 2014 Theodore Sturgeon Award. There are various settings ranging from old homesteads and farms to the seaside to the American south.

Despite this relative lack of turbulence in Furlong’s past, Keegan provides him with a complex, nuanced inner life. p. 94) To what extent did the wider community seem to have knowledge of the real goings-on in the laundries?Eating packets of Bourbon Creams, spitting, listening to Radio One in the car when it rained, sharpening chain, files grinding on the rakers, the cutters shining all around like some deadly necklace. And this landscape tells us things the characters cannot or do not know about the stories they inhabit. Among the better are “Men and Women,” about a suffering Irish farmwife who at last rebels against a cruelly domineering husband; the southern-set “Ride If You Dare,” about a couple who shyly meet after running personals ads; and “Stay Close to the Water’s Edge,” about a Harvard student who despises—and is despised by—his millionaire stepfather. Her writing is so crisp it’s like taking a bite out of a head of lettuce and these stories are so fine tuned and succinct it is nearly miraculous.

is about a flirtation between a Thai teenager who keeps a pet pig named Clint Eastwood and an American girl who wanders around in a bikini. Every time the happily married woman went away,'' the story begins, ''she wondered how it would feel to sleep with another man. Later in the story, news of a serial murder's house - just down the street, and the elder one makes a swift decision, knowing she has to protect her sister. Fruit machines blinked in one corner, and just as she sat on the bar stool, a little battalion of coins fell into a chute. From Nobel Laureates Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter to theatre greats Tom Stoppard and Alan Bennett to rising stars Polly Stenham and Florian Zeller, Faber Drama presents the very best theatre has to offer.They don’t know the half of it, don’t know the disguises I made for them, how I took 20 years off their hard-earned faces, washed the honey-blond rinses out of their hair, how I put them in another country and changed their names. In the heat of July and early August, I’m often drawn to stories set in frigid climates, believing they will help dull that sense of lethargy and invigorate the spirit a bit.

Small Things Like These was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and the Rathbones Folio Prize, awarded for the best work of literature, regardless of form, to be published in the English language.

Antarctica, her first collection published in 1999 demonstrates Keegan’s skills already swinging strong across a variety of tales full of infidelities, deaths, sexuality and grief populated by flawed, dynamic characters struggling against the pressures of a patriarchy.

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