Roger Boylan's first novel, Killoyle, established him as a brilliant successor to such Irish masters as Joyce, Beckett, and J. P. Donleavy. Now his new farce follows the hapless inhabitants of Killoyle, Ireland, through the frenetic week of the Pint-Pulling Olympiad. After local lush Mick McCreek gets into a car crash with a cross-dressing church sexton, he enlists a lawyer, Tom O'Mallet. As it turns out, the lawyer's real gig is selling missiles to the IRA, and he plans to use his clueless client as a patsy. O'Mallet also hoodwinks Anil, an Indian waiter who has found himself the unlikely target of a manhunt. What Tom doesn't know is that his lucrative weapons are destined for a massive terrorist attack on the Pint-Pulling Olympiad, and that Anil's sexy cousin Rashmi — a sweatshop worker turned intelligence operative — is hot on the bombers' trail. With a wink and a nudge, Boylan's pyrotechnic prose brings to life Ireland at its manic extremes, proving the author a dazzling and distinctive talent in American fiction.
Roger Boylan is an American writer who was raised in Ireland, France, and Switzerland and attended the University of Ulster and the University of Edinburgh. His novel "Killoyle" was published in 1997 by Dalkey Archive Press and has been reprinted four times. In 2003, a sequel, "The Great Pint-Pulling Olympiad," was published by Grove Press, New York. German versions of both novels, translated by the award-winning German translator and author Harry Rowohlt, were critically and commercially successful. The third volume in the Killoyle trilogy, "The Maladjusted Terrorist," was published in Germany in 2006 and is forthcoming in English. The entire trilogy was reissued in German in 2007 by Kein & Aber, Zurich.
Boylan's latest novel, "The Adorations," in which a Swiss professor named Gustave, Adolf Hitler, Hitler's mistress, the Archangel Michael, and a journalistic sexpot meet at the intersection of history and fantasy, is forthcoming in its original English as well as in German translation.
Boylan's light-hearted memoir, "Run Like Blazes," has been published as a Kindle e-book and is now available on Amazon.com.
Boylan is a regular contributor to Boston Review's "New Fiction Forum" and the online automotive review Autosavant. His stories and articles have appeared in many journals and reviews, including The New York Times Book Review, The Literary Review, The Economist, The Texas Observer, The Austin American-Statesman, and Scrivener. He is working on a novel and a memoir. Currently he lives near Austin, Texas.
