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

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Or take another story - 'The Singing Cashier' - the elder girl, has lustful relations with the postman and sends her younger sibling out of the house on made-up errands, while she does the 'dirty'. 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. It's real-life, a sudden jostling of priorities. I thought it had echoes of the wistful longing of Joyce’s “Eveline,” who is kind of paralyzed by her circumstances. Then, there's the ending that Joyce could never have written--different times, less innocence--that is the thing many readers seem to have had the most impact in the whole collection, and I get that, but I felt a bit disappointed by its predictability. At our current #MeToo moment, this might seem a heretical statement, but Keegan’s morally compromised characters are often themselves the victims of failed institutions. In The Parting Gift, that institution is the family: the girl’s mother and siblings colluded in her abuse. In Small Things Like These, it’s a society that allows itself to be dominated by the church. “And it wasn’t just the church, you know, it was in concert with the Irish state,” she points out. Seven stories, including a couple of prizewinners, from an exuberantly talented young Thai-American writer. In most of her stories, there is a sense of apprehension, which anticipates the action and tells the reader that something sinister, dramatic or exciting is going to happen later in the story, as it does usually; thus, the impact is not only rational and satirical but also visual, emotional and tragic and the story stops at an incredible momentum of unbalanced emotions. ( At the core of every great story is loss. Tension is a fear of loss. Anytime you feel as though something you say or do will reveal something, that’s tension.)

Briena Staunton Visiting Fellowship Awarded to Claire Keegan". Claire Keegan Fiction Writing Courses. 29 July 2020.You Can’t Be Too Careful,” is a small story about a man taken out on a dawn fishing boat by a convict on the run. Suspenseful. Keegan’s writing is so sharp you’ll swear you could cut your finger on it. Like a spider with words as her welcoming web, she grabs the reader with the rather soft writing and astonishing imagery only for them to discover they’re fully trapped in the glory of her creations too late to dodge the emotional blows that sneak up on you. Such is the case with the title story—which makes for one of the finest opening tales I’ve read in a long time—about a woman who heads to the city with the goal of having a brief affair with a stranger. While you have a general unease about the situation, it isn’t until you’ve let your guard down that the ending strikes with such sudden ferocity it practically leaves you gasping for breath. He got up. He went out and left her there, handcuffed to the headboard. The kitchen light came on. She smelled coffee, heard him breaking eggs. He came in with a tray and sat over her. It’s always married people who cry at weddings. They know the difference between the vows and the life.’

She pictured the plant sprawled across the floor, the length of a grown man, its pot no bigger than a small saucepan, dried roots snarling up over the pot. A miracle it was still alive.Many of Claire Keegan’s stories read almost like fables. Her characters include a happily married woman who “wondered what it would feel like to sleep with another man”, a pining woman who waits years for a romantic rendezvous with a married doctor and a crass, homophobic millionaire who strips the joy from his achieving stepson’s life.

The sure narrative pace of Joyce Carol Oates, Alison Lurie or Rose Tremain is matched here in Keegan's most conventional short stories. In 'The Ginger Rogers Sermon', a spontaneous schoolgirl seduces her father's farm hand, Slapper Jim, and alone remains innocent of the consequences while the family dance a jig in the parlour. Her jaunty voice produces poignant effect. This and 'Men and Women', a colourful, melancholy study of family idiocy, must be among the finest contemporary stories written recently in English. Other pieces luxuriate in stasis and their elements hang loose. A girl merely decides to jilt a guy. Two sisters recall being dandled on the knees of the serial killer Fred West, and their postman delivers fish and hanky-panky. The aesthetic here is always the appeal to the palpability of language itself. Suggestions of Heaney and Frost travel through the prose. Keegan might be said to subvert a conventional male expectation of linear logic extended to climax. She thought of Antarctica, the snow and ice and the bodies of dead explorers. Then she thought of hell, and then eternity.’ Together, they will confront their past, the source of all their trouble, and stamp it out. That, at least, is the theory.’ I put my left hand between my legs —not—to masturbate - some type of protection comfort - maybe — over my underwear.

Thinking of the women she’s known and their relationships with men, she knows she will not continue that pattern. “That part of my people ends with me,” she thinks. And she’s fine! Keegan has won the inaugural William Trevor Prize, [11] the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature, [11] the Olive Cook Award and the Davy Byrnes Irish Writing Award 2009. [11] Other awards include the Hugh Leonard Bursary, the Macaulay Fellowship, [11] the Martin Healy Prize, the Kilkenny Prize, and the Tom Gallon Award. She was also a 2002 Wingate Scholar and a two-time recipient of the Francis MacManus Award. She was a visiting professor at Villanova University in 2008. Keegan was the Ireland Fund Artist-in-Residence in the Celtic Studies Department of St. Michael's College at the University of Toronto in March 2009. [12] In 2019, she was appointed as Writing Fellow at Trinity College Dublin. [13] Pembroke College Cambridge and Trinity College Dublin selected Keegan as the 2021 Briena Staunton Visiting Fellow. [14] You’ll come across this line in the fifth story in this collection and think, ah, is that what we’re doing then. Or so I did. The first third or so of the collection is a sketchbook of scenarios featuring women and girls trying to find escape from unhappy, oppressive family life and in the course of such seeming to jump from the frying pan into the fire. A married woman sleeps with a stranger and ends up handcuffed to his bed, gagged, a prisoner. A woman falls in love with a married man who spurns her and spends a decade doing a Miss Havisham. A young teenage girl seduces her family’s farmhand and he goes and hangs himself from the guilt, her discovering his soiled dead body. Forgotten the title or the author of a book? Our BookSleuth is specially designed for you. Visit BookSleuth You’re a very generous lover,” she said afterward, passing him the cigarette. “You’re very generous period.”