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Seanachie: A Boston Irish Storyteller and Part-Time Shaman
Books about place, magic, Faeries, Ireland, sex, God, and love
Currently reading
New Orleans as It Was
New Orleans after the Civil War
Visions and Beliefs in the West of Ireland (complete: First & Second Series)
Bright Dead Things: Poems
The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck: A Counterintuitive Approach to Living a Good Life
Desire: Poems
Selected Poems 1976-2012
An Anthology of Modern Irish Poetry
I Am An Executioner: Love Stories
An Artist of the Floating World
Brief Interviews with Hideous Men
It is hard to consider this collection of "interviews" without considering the author's subsequent suicide. Each of the stories concerns a very educated very conflicted man generally dealing with his relationships with a woman or women in general. The voice throughout is colloquial and often powerful, but the overall tone unsettling and somehow unfinished. Violence simmers beneath the words. These are men's darkest feelings at work. The final story, for example, is about a narrator who picks up a "granola" woman at a concert of lesbian folks singers and brings her home solely for sex. He is surprised when, during their post-coital discussion, she relates a story about being abducted and raped by a psychopath while hitchhiking. His surprise is not so much how she eluded being murdered by her rapist as by his own reaction to the story, which is to fall in love with her and at the same time to simmer with rage when describing the incident to an unnamed woman. The disgust with himself is palpable, but so is the defensiveness and the resentment. A powerful collection that is at times difficult to read.
