Showing results by author "Kevin Barry" in All Categories

October 1891. A hard winter approaches across the Rocky Mountains. The city of Butte, Montana is rich on copper mines and rampant with vice and debauchery among a hard-living crowd of immigrant Irish workers. Here we find Tom Rourke, a young poet and ballad-maker of the town, but also a doper, a drinker, and a fearsome degenerate. Just as he feels his life is heading nowhere fast, Polly Gillespie arrives in town as the new bride of the extremely devout mine captain Long Anthony Harrington.

From wild and wacky to knee-slapping, laugh-out-loud fun, these humorous tales represent some of the best of recent seasons of the hit public radio series Selected Shorts. Comedian Wyatt Cenac gives a killer performance of Simon Rich’s hilarious tale of woe from the point of view of a condom in a young man’s wallet. Alec Baldwin gives a delightful over-the-top performance of James Thurber’s wonderfully silly classic tale of the day everybody in a small Ohio town thought the dam broke.

In the dark waiting room of the ferry terminal in the sketchy Spanish port of Algeciras, two aging Irishmen - Maurice Hearne and Charlie Redmond, longtime partners in the lucrative and dangerous enterprise of smuggling drugs - sit at night, none too patiently. It is October 23, 2018, and they are expecting Maurice's estranged daughter, Dilly, to either arrive on a boat coming from Tangier or depart on one heading there. This nocturnal vigil will initiate an extraordinary journey back in time to excavate their shared history of violence, romance, mutual betrayals, and serial exiles.

With three novels and two short story collections published, Kevin Barry has steadily established his stature as one of the finest writers not just in Ireland but in the English language. All of his prodigious gifts of language, character, and setting in these 11 exquisite stories transport the listener to an Ireland both timeless and recognizably modern. Shot through with dark humor and the uncanny power of the primal and unchanging Irish landscape, the stories in That Old Country Music represent some of the finest fiction being written today.

Key Murphy is a freak, a prodigy. He has visions so real he’s diagnosed with PTSD. Key learns that his visions might be caused by a mutated gene which allows him to experience the memories of an ancestor. Key also has a family link to The Book of Kells. Pages from the book were stolen in Ireland in the distant past. Those pages are believed to contain a fundamental secret of Christendom.

Shortlisted for the 2011 Costa First Novel Award. Winner of the Authors' Club Best First Novel Award. Forty years in the future. The once-great city of Bohane on the west coast of Ireland is on its knees, infested by vice and split along tribal lines. There are the posh parts of town, but it is in the slums and backstreets of Smoketown, the tower blocks of the Northside Rises and the eerie bogs of Big Nothin' that the city really lives.

It is 1978, and John Lennon has escaped New York City to try to find the island off the west coast of Ireland he bought nine years prior. Leaving behind domesticity, his approaching 40s, his inability to create, and his memories of his parents, he sets off to find calm in the comfortable silence of isolation. But when he puts himself in the hands of a shape-shifting driver full of Irish charm and dark whimsy, what ensues can only be termed a magical mystery tour.

It's late one night at the Spanish port of Algeciras, and two fading Irish gangsters are waiting on the boat from Tangier. A lover has been lost, a daughter has gone missing, their world has come asunder - can it be put together again? Night Boat to Tangier is a novel drenched in sex and death and narcotics, in sudden violence and old magic, but it is obsessed, above all, with the mysteries of love. A tragicomic masterwork from a multi-award-winning writer, Night Boat to Tangier is both mordant and hilarious, lyrical yet laden with menace.

Step into a world steeped in danger and high-stakes suspense in this riveting thriller. The explosion. Iraq. The white lights beckoned her from this life to the next. A hand reached down. Marine Captain Cat Fahey stretched toward it, night after horrific night, as she lay on the park bench in Philadelphia. Once a military legend, now homeless. She knew, without doubt, the hand reaching to her was her ancestor, warning her that the Vice President would be killed in Philadelphia. There was only one person who would believe her. She had to find Key Murphy. The clock is ticking...

Diverse and moving, these six outstanding stories are meditations on grief and loss, love, communication and loneliness. Each one will take the reader on a brief yet unforgettable journey into private worlds and unexpected corners of the human heart.

The Better Off Dead series delves into the furthest corners of your mind, where your deepest, darkest fears lurk. These masters of horror will haunt your dreams and stalk your nightmares, taking you to the edge of sanity before pushing you to the brink of madness!

In the most basic sense, worship is the act of offering praise to God. But worship is a much more powerful act than we are often aware. It is nothing less than an opened floodgate, unleashing a supernatural flow between heaven and earth. For the first time, multiple generations of apostolic, prophetic, and warfare worship leaders join together to reveal the ways in which God is working through praise and worship today! Discover how you can participate in it, and what you can expect from this fresh move of God!

The explosion in storytelling festivals and one-person shows demonstrate that Americans are growing disenchanted with the mass media and returning to the simple pleasures of a well-told story. Here is a survey of great contemporary monologues, including excerpts by Spalding Gray, Lynda Barry, Tom Bodett, and Peter Matthiessen.

In this bundle, I've included the first three books (It Has Begun, Diggin In, and Summer's End) and a short story bonus - "When Jack Met Diane". Find out how the leading characters met and started their journey together.

Are you tired of the rat race and want to get away from it all? Are you tired of giving so much of your paycheck to utility companies? Tired of the local government telling you what you can and can’t do with your own property? Maybe you just want to live a minimalist lifestyle and leave a smaller footprint. For a lot of people, getting off the grid is the answer. In How to Get off The Grid and Survive, I show you what you need to do to prepare for life off the grid. This is a beginner’s guide and will help you answer the big question....

October, 1891. Butte, Montana. A hard winter approaches across the Rocky Mountains. The city is rich on copper mines and rampant with vice and debauchery among a hard-living crowd of immigrant Irish workers. Here we find Tom Rourke, a young poet and balladmaker, but also a doper, a drinker and a fearsome degenerate. Just as he feels his life is heading nowhere fast, Polly Gillespie arrives in town as the new bride of the devout mine captain Long Anthony Harrington.

Since his landmark debut collection, There Are Little Kingdoms, and his award-winning second book, Dark Lies the Island, Kevin Barry has been acclaimed as one of the world's most accomplished and gifted short-story writers. In this third collection, That Old Country Music, we encounter a ragbag of West of Ireland characters, many on the cusp between love and catastrophe, heartbreak and epiphany, resignation and hope. These stories show an Ireland in a condition of great flux but also as a place where older rhythms, and an older magic, somehow persist.

The day started out like any other; Diane and Jack started their morning routines and equipped their everyday carry items. Survival is for the prepared. But when disaster strikes the US, Jack's lifetime of preparing will be put to the test. Grabbing their two dogs and their bug-out bags, the duo must escape their hometowns and find a safe place to seek shelter. What really happened, and will Jack's years of prepping be enough to keep them all safe?

Continue the journey of Jack and Diane as they navigate the new reality. With more attacks, the duo and Jack's group decide this is not a one-off attack. It's time to dig in and prepare for what's coming next. Meet new characters and find out what the terrorists planned next.

[Contains explicit content] Featuring sets from Barry Crimmins, Maronzio Vance, Mary Lynn Rajskub, Kevin Shea and Tony Deyo.